Like just about every other metropolis with pretensions of being an international leader, Taipei has recently been styling itself as "the city that never sleeps."
This hyperbole (Discover Taipei) is based on the existence of a few night clubs and markets, some vendors selling snacks, a handful of all-night eateries on Fuxing South Road offering congee and a couple of Hong Kong-style dim sum joints.
Joining the 24-seven club is Tr, which opened three months ago in the East Side shopping district and takes aim at sleepless twenty-somethings who seek a watering hole with WiFi access.
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
Locally owned but borrowing heavily from Japan for its look and from Hong Kong with its chef, Tr provides a mix of food and drinks ranging from full-course meals to custard tarts.
Reasonably popular already with the lunchtime and evening meal shopping crowd that packs Zhongxiao East Road, Tr is bright and white with black accents.
The first floor comfortably accommodates around 100 people. There is a diverting widescreen TV and a selection of papers and magazines to while away the time. The mostly bass and treble sound system pours out pop music at a volume low enough not to be irritating.
The food at Tr emphasizes convenience over substance, in that it provides reasonable quality control and cost, but will never make the fine-dining list. It's not a first-date eatery.
The staple dish is curry, which is sweet rather than authentic Indian. From NT$160 for chicken, up to NT$200 for fresh fish, it arrives in a large bowl of mostly potatoes and braised onions. On a separate plate is a scoop of rice, a serving of cabbage and slice of French bread. It all washes down well with a pineapple crushed ice (NT$100).
Wait staff recommendations included the Fujian fried rice and there are a couple of "special dishes" on the menu from 11am to 2pm and 5pm to 10pm, including a whole chicken baked in dongjiang sauce for NT$600. Baked shrimps in cheese, satay and a respectable range of sandwiches around the NT$100 mark are other options.
For the record New York is the original city that never sleeps and was so called by the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News after the world's biggest gas and electric plants were built there in 1912 -- "and as a result is soon to add to its title of the city that never sleeps that of the city that never grows dark."
Crop damage from Typhoon Danas “had covered 9,822 hectares of farmland, more than 1.5 percent of Taiwan’s arable land, with an average loss rate of 30 percent, equivalent to 2,977 hectares of total crop failure,” this paper reported on Thursday last week. Costs were expected to exceed NT$1 billion. The disaster triggered clashes in the legislature last week between members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and China-aligned lawmakers from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). DPP caucus chief executive Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) argued that opposition lawmakers should take responsibility for slashing the Ministry of Agriculture’s (MOA)
July 14 to July 20 When Lin Tzu-tzeng (林資曾) arrived in Sansia (三峽) in 1830, he found the local conditions ideal for indigo dyeing. Settlers had already planted indigo across the nearby hills, the area’s water was clean and low in minerals and the river offered direct transport to the bustling port of Bangka (艋舺, modern-day Wanhua District in Taipei). Lin hailed from Anxi (安溪) in Fujian Province, which was known for its dyeing traditions. He was well-versed in the craft, and became wealthy after opening the first dyeing workshop in town. Today, the sign for the Lin Mao Hsing (林茂興) Dye
Asked to define sex, most people will say it means penetration and anything else is just “foreplay,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual and relationship therapist, and author of The Science of Sex. “This pedestals intercourse as ‘real sex’ and other sexual acts as something done before penetration rather than as deserving credit in their own right,” she says. Lesbian, bisexual and gay people tend to have a broader definition. Sex education historically revolved around reproduction (therefore penetration), which is just one of hundreds of reasons people have sex. If you think of penetration as the sex you “should” be having, you might
As the world has raced to understand how Taiwan can be both the world’s most important producer of semiconductors while also the pin in the grenade of World War III, a reasonable shelf of “Taiwan books” has been published in the last few years. Most describe Taiwan according to a power triangle dominated by the US and China. But what of the actual Taiwanese themselves? Who are they? And should they have any say in the matter? Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival is perhaps the first general history of Taiwan to answer
RSS