Shabu Shabu

I managed to meet up with Julia, who is up from Kaohsiung on yet another training session for her company. Although she had some difficulty finding the rendezvous point, and I had to wait for her for about twenty minutes, it afforded an excellent opportunity to see just how long the spandex-tights, spike-heeled sandals and hairdo from hell woman would leave her car illegally parked in front of the glasses store as she went in with her child and the others who continued to emerge from her Mercedes like clowns at the circus. (The precise answer is unknown, as she never did come out before I left with Julia.) And I tragically failed to get a picture of her as well.

Since it was raining by that point, we ducked into the fortuitously located "Every Day Cafe", which had been recommended anyway. Nothing wrong with the food or drink there -- but the woman does seem to subscribe to the "service with a snarl" credo. Admittedly it may have been because we were laughing over the "Almighty Juice" drink selection. As appealing as the idea of trying out its powers was, we settled for more mundane beverages. The place was totally empty so there wasn't a huge rush to get out, not that the presence of other paying customers who need to sit down while consuming their order ever motivates anyone in Taiwan to get a move on.

After awhile we decided to go over and bother Chris, who was predictably working at his favorite spot outside the Lumiere Cafe. The prices are rather high at this fine establishment, but it is still Chris' workplace of choice, probably because of the outdoor seating and the free internet. Julia read some books, I did some drawing and Chris droned on (he uses voice input) about smoking prevention plans in Taiwan. We then decided to eat hotpot, not really because the weather is a bit cool but more because Julia and I generally eat hotpot when I can talk her into it. The problem was that there were no hotpot restaurants in the area of the cafe. The one we had formerly gone to all the time is now gone, along with the venerable tiebanshao shop next door. We eventually settled on the one on Roosevelt Rd. by Pucheng St. and Julia and I jumped into a cab to beat Chris and his bicycle there (but only by a nose).

Hotpot used to be a group thing where you had one big conical vessel in the middle of a round table with a heat source under it, and everyone dropped bits of food into the boiling broth to cook their own, picking things out with chopsticks. The thing these days is the Japanese individual hotpots called "shabu shabu". You get a big plate with all sorts of things on it -- several types of cabbage, bits of beancurd stuff, vegetables, mushrooms, a slice of ginger -- and order some sort of meat to go with it. Usually it's thin-sliced chicken or beef. I am a great aficionado of fish dumpings, so I got two sets of those to go with my shabu shabu (and a good thing it was, too, as Chris managed to dump fully half of them into his pot in his attempt to take two or three. Claims it was an accident. Yeah, right. With fishy dumplings there are no accidents of that kind.)