The night market of Burqin (布爾津)

The night market is famous for grilled fish from Irtysh River (額爾齊斯河).

新疆抓飯, Urumqi

The tour guide took us to this small roadside restaurant just outside of the airport for lunch before flying out to Altay (阿勒泰).  She claims that it has the best local Uyghyr (維吾爾) food.  We had some dishes to go with noodle, which tasted like Japanese Undo noodle.  But the real highlight is the rice dish that they were cooking.  We finally had a plate of it, it was good, better than many of the same dishes that we had latter on during the trip.

A Typical Lunch at Countryside in Bali

Basic Necessities, Nellysford, VA

Basic Necessities is real a jewel out in the nowhere.  My friend, Billy, suggested that we should pass by for a visit.  We arrived too early for dinner and too late to have afternoon tea.  It sells wine and cheese from all over the world.  We hung out for a while before we could sit for the dinner.  The two color ravioli was alright but the steak was best I have had, from the local organic farm.  We also had a bottle of very nice Virginian vine.

三芝小豬

We had breakfast this morning at this very interesting cafe located at 三芝.  It is in the mountain at the back of our condo.

Nikon V1,10mm 2.8, HDR Efex Pro 2: 緣麵屋enishi

This is the only Taiwan outlet of the famous Japanese Noodle shop, 緣麵屋 (Enishi).  We went once a month during the past several months.  The usual wait is one hour.  The people on the left were having the noodle in front of the kitchen, the people on the right were waiting patiently.

Here is the kitchen, we can see how the noodles are made.

It is not me who was eating the noodle, but I got the seat next to him after one hour wait.

Not only the noodle is cooked right in front of us, but each piece of meat is fired before it is served.

This is what we came for 沾麵.  The soup is hot but the noodle was rinsed in cold water to keep it "Al Dente" or in Taiwanese "Q".  We dip the noodle in the soup before we eat it, very nice indeed.

Champagne_Alsace_Lorraine_Paris

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We left Taiwan at late night of Friday, May 4 on a direct flight of EVA airline to Paris and arrived in the early morning of Saturday, the 5th.  We rented a car and drove straight to Reims at the heart of Champagne region.  We arrived at our destination before 11 AM and had a chance to visit the Cathedral before having our first French meal on the trip.  After lunch, we drove through a small segment of Route Touristique de Champagne in the Champagne-producing region before heading back onto highway A4 to Metz in the Lorriane region to spend the night.  The next day, Sunday, the 6th, we made our tour of the old town of Metz before driving to the old town of Strasbourg, Petite France.  We had lunch at Petite France then headed south on highway A35 to Colmar, deep in the wine growing region of Alsace.  We stayed in the Petite Venice, the old town of Colmar.  On Monday, the 7th, we visited two small villages, Kayserberg and Riquewihr alone the Route du Vine Alsace before crossing the northern end of Vosges mountain and coming back into the Lorriane region to visit Nancy.  We stayed close to its old town, Place Stanislas.  Tuesday, the 8th, we drove from Nancy back to the Charles de Gaulle Airport, returned the car and took a taxi to Paris downtown.  Grace was busy for her meetings during the next three days.  We did some shopping together on Wednesday morning at Galleries Lafayette, I then spent three hours photographing Eiffel Tower.  On Thursday, I walked through most of the familiar places in Paris by myself.  I did not do any photography on Friday, instead, spent the whole day at Musée d'Orsay.  However, I did spend sometime at night to photograph the Arc de Triomphe.  We flew back to Taiwan on Saturday, May 12, a short but compact trip!

Petite France, Strasbourg

We arrived at the old town of Strasbourg, Petite France, in the early afternoon of Sunday, May 6, after a 2-hour drive from Metz.  The rain was still following us.  We decided to have lunch first and we wanted a typical Alsace meal.   Here is a Choucroute  with six different meats, that was for me.

Here is the famous local Alsace dish, tart flambé.  It is almost like a pizza but uses fresh cream and onion as base instead of tomato.

 This is the restaurant that we had our lunch.

 It is a very old building, it seems that not a bone in this house is straight!

 The restaurant sits right on the river and you can see the name of the restaurant, Restaurant Marco Polo.  A very typical touristic restaurant, it was just what we wanted.

After lunch, the rain stopped, we walked around the Petite France area a bit before heading south on A35 to our next destination Colmar.  The area is very beautiful but with a lot of tourists.  With much skill and patience, we managed to avoid most of them in our pictures.

Today's Flower #105: Orchids at Restaurant Sixteen

I (Grace) was at the Restaurant Sixteen of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in early June.  The table setting included a single green orchid in a frosted glass vase.

The dessert is a key lime pie which matched the orchid very nicely.  It is not only good looking but very delicious indeed, moist and creamy!

On another side of the dining table are orange orchids which stand out from the white tablecloth and simple tablewares.

To see more flowers around the world click here.

Today's Flowers #87: Citrus Maxima 柚

Citrus Maxima 柚子is a plant very special for the Southeast Asia. The only counterpart that is similar to it in the Western world is grapefruit. However, Citrus Maxima has a special fragrance coming out from the oil of the skin of the fruit. The smell and taste are completely different from those of grapefruit.

We saw from the newspaper last week that it is the Citrus Maxima flowering season now and they can be viewed in a local fruit farm called "Doris Farm". It also serves very good lunch. Grace and I made it there last Sunday. It was about one hour from our home.

We have seen peach, plum, cherry blossoms before but never for Citrus maxima. The flower is very fragrant and the whole farm is filled with that fragrance. The flower comes out as a cluster of over 10 flower buds. By natural selection, most of them will fall off, with one left for forming the fruit.

Doris Farm is half way up to a small mountain overlooking Taipei Harbor. It has flowering beds, mountain walk and of course hundreds of citrus maxima trees. I brought two lenses with me AF DC-Nikkor 135mm f/2D and AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED. I had some very nice close-up shots of the blossoms and some portraits of Grace, and indeed we had a very good lunch in the countryside.

Too see more flowers from around the world click here.

A Long Way Back Home

I must apologize to many of our blogging friends that we have not been active in our internet blogging activities for the last two weeks. The reason has been many folds. First, we lost our internet connection back in our house on Cape Cod. The only way we could get online was to go to the Mashpee Common Shopping Mall. The second was we were overwhelmed by the visit of our daughter's family during the last week of July. The third was our long journey back home to Taipei. Grace left for San Francisco for a conference on Friday, July 31. I left Cape Cod on Tuesday, August 4, to go back to Taiwan via San Francisco too. We had a brief rendezvous at San Francisco airport before she took off to Taiwan before me.

Due to various last minutes schedule alternation, I ended up to have to stay with my good friend, Dean, in San Francisco for two nights. It was good to see him and his family, especially his new grandson. Dean took me out to the north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge to have an afternoon photographic tour on the Pacific coast of Marine County. These were pictures that I took of this beautiful and rugged coast line during the trip. Our final destination was an oyster farm on Hog Island. The oysters were very delicious.

When I finally ready to fly back to Taiwan in the morning on Thursday, August 6, I was told in the airport that my connecting flight from Tokyo to Taipei was cancelled due to typhoon. The next available flight will be on August 11!!! I finally got on a flight to Seoul, Korea, stayed one night and took a flight to Taipei the next day and arrived back home on Saturday afternoon.

Neither of us can sleep on Sunday morning due to jet-leg. We went out to eat at a roadside noodle stand at 4 AM. The place was packed with taxi drivers, journalists and late night party goers. After a satisfying meal, we went out for a drive then went to the traditional market for some grocery shopping.  After all these activities in the early morning, it was just in time for us to go to the 2009 Paganin Festival in Taiwan at National Music Theater.  It was hosted by Eva Air, with its own Evergreen Symphony Orchestra.  The guests were three Chinese violinists, Feng Ning, Mengla Huang and Bin Huang, all have won 1st Prize at the prestige Paganin International Violin Competition in Genova.  It was a marvelous concert.  Afterwards, we had lunch at the original store of the world famous dumpling restaurant, Dintafung (鼎泰豐). We were glade that we were finally home.

In the meantime, we had the worst flood in Taiwan history at the southern part of Taiwan during the weekend. In one area, the accumulative rainfall was close to 3000 mm!!