Friday, April 30

We spent most the day at our cooking class with Jodie Tsai, something I arranged a while ago. Jodie is the #1 Taipei attraction in Trip Advisor and we’ve decided that cooking classes are a good way to understand the local culture so I set up this class and negotiated with Jodie on what would be included.

We had the class in Jodie’s apartment in Southwest Taipei. The building is part way up a small mountain and the view from her patio window is amazing.


The three of us sat at a dining room table while Jodie explained basic ingredients of Taiwanese cooking and walked us through the preparation of basic sauces, easy sweet and sour soup, and green onion pancakes. The recipes are flexible and the cook can incorporate any flavors they want to .


The class was supposed to be four hours long but we stayed and chatted with Jodie for more than six hours, spending the last hour sipping the local oolong tea and talking about religion, small businesses, property values in the US and Taipei, and more. The most interesting part wase Jodie’s explanation of how she has reconciled her Christian upbringing with the Buddhism and Taoism that permeates Taiwan. She'd decided after a lot of study and throught that Buddhism is about seeking fulfillment through pursuing the values represented by the statues at the temples, not about worshipping idols and she's embraced that Buddhist point of view.

Jodie took us out to the Elephant Mountain walking trail, which requires going up and down a lot of very steep stairs. Two steps in and we were in a lush tropical forest. We didn’t get too far before we turned back and headed downhill.

We then walked to Taipei 101, the second highest building in the world. Taipei 101 towers over the southwest side of the city and you can see it from anywhere in Taipei and from the nearby mountains.

It was still light when we went into the building, but it was almost dark by the time we reached the 89th floor. The view of the city was pretty spectacular but it was difficult to orient ourselves so we could understand where everything was. We also walked up to the 91st floor to outside observation deck but it was pretty windy up there so we moved on.


The most interesting thing I saw there was the inertial damper, a 660 metic ton ball of steel that isolates the building from the earth. It hangs between the 91st and 88th floors, attached to the building with huge braided steel cables and sitting on a cradle of some sort. I’m still not sure I understand how it works but it was a pretty amazing sight.

We didn’t want to eat dinner in the posh food court at Taipei 101, so we headed back to the night market and had some jiaodze, rice noodles, and gelato (formerly known as bing chilling). I had a mango gelatto that was wonderful but Sally had Black Plum which turned out to be the flavor of those preserved plums we used to have.