I love Taiwan

I know what y’all are thinking…“is there any place that he DOESN’T love?”

To which the answer is, clearly you don’t know me very well.

A few weeks ago I went to Taiwan for my annual trip to see my family and have awesome food, and let me tell you, Taiwan has awesome and cheap food. It’s so good that it makes me sad to think about the state of Chinese food in the bay area. Basically, there are no decent Chinese food places in the bay area. Any average place in Taipei is better than any Chinese place in the bay area, and I have no idea why. (LA, on the other hand, has fantastic Chinese food.) 

In any case, my cousin took my brother and I down to Tainan for a couple days, and all we did was walk around and eat. We never really ate a full meal though, at least by American standards. It felt like we were eating appetizers the whole day (see below).

Since it was quite humid, we also had these cold desserts everywhere we went. Top right picture below is a deep-fried toast (literally translated, coffin bread) that’s a Tainan specialty. 

Taipei had no shortage of desserts either…top left is the famous mango Ice Monster. We went there two days in a row, and would have probably gone more if I had bothered to look it up earlier. Too bad they hadn’t yet started serving the summer version of the mango dessert (it has a lot more mango).

I miss it already, and can’t wait for my next trip.