Back in the wan for the first time in 5 months. Memories, precious memories come flooding back. But back too come the things I seem to have purposefully forgotten. Here are some of the ones I must have blocked out, for good or for bad…
McDonalds breakfast is both yummy and cheap.
Hot pot is the stupidest meal ever. It doesn’t fill you up, it takes ages, and the soup is a manky fish broth. Waste of cash.
There is nothing on TV.
That radio station that shall not be named is still too awful for my ears.
MrsHill spends large chunks of our incomes on her wardrobe yet still proclaims to have no clothes.
Hot Pot? Go exercise until you’ve built up a nice greasy sweat. Then take a hot bath with cabbage and other flavorless veggies and meat sliced so thinly it’s almost transparent. Swirl all the ingredients around you until everything has the same degree of tepid blandness and the texture of a soggy kleenex.
Uhm… only had it once, but as long as you get that black (fish based?) sauce and mix some chili and garlic in it, it was ok. Not the best meal I’ve ever had, but compared to some shit I’ve eaten, it really wasn’t bad.
I’m also not a big fan of hot pot–at any time of the year. And it is inevitable that whenever we get a “cold” spell in Taipei, each TV news station will always have a reporter in front of a hot-pot restaurant that is packed to the gills.
what you do is say. put only a few pieces of sliced pork in it , enough to cook and then put that in some soy sauce and eat that. The thing to do is NOT to put all the ingredients in it at the same time.
it CAN be good. Some of the dept stores basement hotpots were good and good value at bout 150nt.
About the hotpot thing, I’ve enjoyed hotpot here, but Taiwanese hotpot isn’t really hotpot. Forget your bland grey broth with soggy cabbage and a few scary pink fish protein things floating around. Sichuanese hotpot is the real deal. It actually has the “ma” numbing characteristic that all the so-called mala hotpots here don’t have. That’s good because the numbing effect makes the searing chili effect more bearable. Delicious though.
I will chime in on the pro-pot side
I like it. Train Shaboo-shaboo is my favorite incarnation. I can’t eat fish products so I ask for water and bring chicken cubes. Some places actually have good soup, but I know they are hard to find.