Welcome to my Food Criticism Blog!

Did I mention that I found the guy with the breakfast place that Stefan told me about? His name is Jack. I've been going there most days for breakfast; for less than $2 I can get a cup of tea and a plate of egg scallion pancakes. On top of that, I get to practice Chinese with Jack. Yesterday he offered to make the tutoring "official"--so now I go there near closing time and we talk for about an hour. Once again, I am completely embarrassed and humbled by the generosity of the people I have met here.

After my lesson today I met Ivy downtown. Every Wednesday, she and some of the other people in her office meet to practice English in the "Idea Room". Each week there is a different host, and this week was Ivy's turn. She had asked me to come in as a guest English speaker. The meeting was near lunchtime, so Ivy had also brought a large array of food, which served as the main topic of our conversation. We didn't even try everything she brought, but the foods we did try were spicy hot pot with tofu and noodles, egg onion pancakes (which actually have a consistency kind of like naan), and mushy rice with peanut powder. Then there was what they called "tempura", although it was in a soup and didn't look like the food we know by that name. One of the tempura items: fried blood. Looking at the porous, black cubes, I wouldn't have guessed that they were blood, except that they didn't look like any other kind of food I have ever seen. The meeting went by pretty quickly, and afterward they forced me to take home most of the leftover food. How will I ever go hungry with all this food?

This evening I took the bus to Tianmu (which I actually know both characters for!). Tianmu has a reputation for being an international district full of foreigners. I'm not sure I can verify this, because there weren't very many people at all when I got there around 5pm. I did find one thing, however, that made me believe the hype: a Mexican restaurant. With burritos. I was saddened to find out that it was an upscale place, with actual decor and no burrito offered for less than eight dollars. I moved on. On the advice of a girl at a factory outlet clothing store on the same street, I continued up the street to a place called (I think) Sheng Kou Wei (tones 4 3 4), and ordered the Kezi Mian Xian (1 4 4). I ordered at the counter outside and then went into a little room to sit. The girl had told me that this dish didn't have meat other than seafood, but after hesitating for a second I decided to go make sure. I arrived just in time to stop them from dumping a healthy portion of intestines into my soup. The soup was a thick, gloppy, brown substance composed of broth and noodles so thin, delicate, and short that they were inseparable from the broth. Instead of intestines, mine was filled with small, runny oysters. Despite how delicious I'm making this food sound, it was good. The broth was heavily laden with scallions and garlic. The only thing that gave me the creeps was the fact that the oysters seemed only partially cooked. I learned that there's a secondhand market in Tianmu on weekends, so I might go back there in a couple days.

Now to my troubles. I've been working on finding accommodations for Hong Kong; my friend recommended a couple hostels to me. On Monday I tried booking a room online, but for some reason the site wouldn't accept my debit card number. I sent the hostel organization an email, and got an actual reservation form to fill out. But it's a longish form and I didn't get around to filling it out till today. Actually, I'm still not finished filling it out--it's a confusing form. In any case, that's all irrelevant, because I just checked and they're booked now. If I'm unable to find another place to reserve, my worst-case plan is to make a list of possibilities, and then go from one to the next when I get there until I find one that has a room. Anyway, I'm not too worried. Apparently this is part of traveling!

Below are two pictures from the (outside of the) National Palace Museum. Then there's a picture of Da'an Forest Park, which I walked through on Sunday. It's kind of a strange park. As you can see, the "forest" is composed of more or less regular rows of similar-looking trees. And there's no understory, just a flat, dusty plane scattered with leaves. Elsewhere there's a section for palm trees.