There is plenty of food in Ximending, ranging from the vendors (if you can catch them) who play cat-and-mouse with the police near Ximen MRT Station, to TGIF and assorted hot pot and barbecue joints, with everything in between. These are just two places visited on a recent trawl through the area.
Reading between the lines of the menu at New Bangkok Thai Restaurant (
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
I was tempted by the NT$100 set-meal advertised in the window so it is, perhaps, a little miserly to describe the decor as being an example of unpretentious industrial brutism, that is divided by a grove of fake bamboo. On the up-side, it was new and clean. A chicken curry with rice cost NT$150.
New Bangkok Thai Food is at 80 Kunming St, Taipei (
There's good coffee to be found in Ximending as it was one of the wholesaling areas for the bean many years ago. Coffee shops dating to the 1950s and earlier can be found around Guilin Street, not far from the MRT stop. Many of them are dim-lit affairs with heavy wooden tables and a simple choice of filtered coffees. Retired soldiers read papers and ladies meet in groups.
Shenshi Cafe (
There are other milk and juice bars, tea and high-end coffee shops and various cool places in the area to sit and talk, eat and drink. Take your pick.
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The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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