There was an aquatic theme to today, as we went for lunch to renowned old seafood place (founded in 1940, so before the white army retreat into Taiwan) where we had the set menu for two. It began with mullet roe and squid, a crab soup and shrimp rolls, the centrepiece was mud crab on glutinous rice. All quite tasty, though I thought the glutinous rice was nicer than the crab, which had a slightly tough, overcooked feel to it. It finished with almond tofu soup, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Next we went for coffee at Kaffun (which I always want to rhyme with KA-BOOM). Unfortunately the Gentleman Friend found it all a bit oppressive on the stomach (he was already a little unwell) so coffee was rather quiet. There was also a very distracting video playing on a projector, right in my line of sight – a sort of “best of” the marine world, with any number of octopuses, rays, cuttlefish etc, including the fairy-like flocks of cuttlefish we once swam with off Flores. There were also a number of videos of marine animals eating each other which were rather hypnotic, perhaps because they were less bloody than the terrestrial equivalents.
On returning, I continued my life change plan, and have developed a study plan for Chinese and purchased a few resources as well. Before coffee I had done a bit of work and a few other matters including a study plan for raags, listening to an hour-long Raag Todi on the sitar, some reading, some listening to podcasts, etc. So it’s been a pretty full day but so far successful as I have done virtually no online faffing around. However, I am still behind: Spanish is still pending, for example, and I’m slightly worried I might have booked more things for the day than I have waking hours available. Though we did go for a rather long lunch and coffee.
I think I have not previously written about our neighbourhood bakery, which is quite a delight. It is almost exactly downstairs from us, and is open only 2-3 days a week, for 90 minutes at a time. One has to queue for a numbered token to be allowed in, and usually everything is finished. They do take advance orders for the next day, except sometimes they don’t take orders because they’ve got too many, and in any case they sound really doubtful if they should allow you to place an order at all. We’ve now befriended one of them, and she has agreed to take our orders over Line, though still sometimes says no. The bread is the best we’ve had in Taiwan, and some of the cakes have been excellent, in particular a taro swiss roll and a classical creme caramel. Today we have a Basque cheesecake, which I am very much looking forward to, though I am slightly worried about our arteries as we’ve been having cakes at least 3 days a week and sometimes more. Well, it’s not for long.