2013 Taiwan Trip Day 3 (Dinner In Town)

I loooooove Taiwan’s custard buns and lava buns!!! They make this siopao bun, but inside it is a really thick and yolk-ey paste of custard. As for the lava bun, it’s basically a custard bun but the custard flows out like lava. I could eat this all of my life and be content.

This is my photo heavy post (I’m sorry there’s just a lot of photo-worthy stuff in Taiwan!!!) on our third day in Taiwan. On the third day we went to the temple to pay respects to the ashes of my great grandmother who had passed away over thirty years ago. We also shopped at Carrefour and spent dinner with papa’s long time friends from waaay back in primary school.

The temple part is kind of the funny part because we were supposed to pay a solemn visit to my great grandmother’s ashes but realized when we were already in the temple that this was the wrong temple and that my great grandmother’s ashes were in the smaller temple next door. Anyhow, this first temple we went to was really beautiful and serene.

And when it’s not raining, there’s a lot of pigeons on the rooftop. The general aura is calm and peaceful so there are a lot of birds flying around and chirping whilst perched on the temple’s trees.

As with any temple, there are a lot of ‘stylish’ doorposts…

This is the view on the way to the top of the temple. The general feel is different from temples here in the Philippines because the temple is really cold, and that it’s built on a hill, requiring a good amount of stair climbing before you can reach some of the shrines… Here in the Philippines I have yet to see a temple built on a hill, or a temple that requires a good amount of staircase usage for that fact…

Majestic temple indeed…

After our visit to the right temple (which I no longer took photos of as it’s a more intimate shrine…), we went to buy lunch. While mom was ordering, I went to this store with four floors of cutesy stuff and stationery. Like look at how adorable this alpaca is!!!

These sheep plushies were uber cute, but I no longer bought them as I’d have no use for them once I take them home (our house gets dusty very easily so they’d just be kept inside a cabinet in solitude if ever I bought them)…

This is a grilled chicken thigh…

These are now the photos from the dinner we had with papa’s friends. They were his primary school friends, and they have not met basically since they graduated high school which is almost more than 30 years ago…

They even serve preserved ampalaya, which thankfully is only slightly bitter and actually pretty sweet…

Some of the cold cuts, with Chinese chorizo in sight…

They even serve their hot prawn salad in giant seashells!!!

And this is by far the best roast duck we have ever tasted in our whole lives… We have had roast duck in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and everywhere else in between, but nothing will beat the deliciousness of this duck! It’s super juicy, super tasty, and contrary to the usual roast duck wherein the skin is super oily but the meat is dry, this duck’s meat is moist and tender!

And this basically sums up all of papa’s friends. There’s Uncle danny on the left, Uncle Clinton and his wife Aunt Bhing, Aunt Judy and her husband Unle Reggie. And do not be scared, the green fluid is kiwi juice (although it does look scary at the first glance…)

And right most is my dad, who is in a funny get-up because he has an extremely severe case of bronchitis and tonsilitis that he needed to wear his old style vest and use a handkerchief as a makeshift scarf to keep his neck warm.

Uncle Danny had made the effort to fall in line a store called Tiramisu that sells (you guessed it): Tiramisu. The cake, as they say, is less than 500 pesos, but is extremely heavenly. It’s not too sweet, is very creamy, and has the right mix of bitter and sweet… Because of the good price and the really good quality, we were told that one needs to fall in line for about two hours just to buy this cake…

This must be their oreo cheesecake… the cake was too hard and we were already too full that we did not touch this cake anymore…

We had quite a lot of dessert considering that we had two cakes and custard buns…

This is Uncle Reggie with my dad. Unfortunately, the hotel room was too small that we could not take a photo inside the room, and that the corridor on the other hand has super bad lighting…

Aunt Judy and mama posed in a better lit area of the corridor, and that’s why they have nicer photos…

They were so nice to even send us this box of uber yummy pudding to take back home to the Philippines! Apparently it’s an all organic, all natural egg pudding that uses natural vanilla from the pods and not from essence.

Aren’t they beautiful? They must have some special sort of machine to be able to slice the top off of the eggs this perfectly..

Basically this pudding tastes like the jellified filling of a Beard Papa cream puff– which i do not mind eating for the rest of my life *cough cough*

And they even gave us these portable speakers! I have not yet opened this box, but I definitely will in the coming days… too bad I no longer have my iPod with me…