Dave was in town!

Dave was in Taipei for about a week thanks to the Golden Week in Japan (where's the golden week in Taiwan??) so of course we hung out and had lots of fun :) it's also cool cos this is the 3rd time we've met up with each other and it's always been in a different country... 1st in Japan in March 2008 during APX, then in Singapore in December 2008 when he was on holiday, and now in Taipei... I wonder where we'll meet again next...

Anyway, this post shall be a photo feast cos otherwise it's too hard to describe all the stuff we did :)

We had Sichuan noodles lunch with the rest of my colleagues and Dave was cordially invited to join us the next day at...

Karaoke! random self-organized thingy in a really fancy KTV place... I thought it was a hotel when we walked in... plus, they served really good dinner, had very well-dressed waiters and waitresses, and all in all really looked like a hotel... our KTV room even came with an attached bathroom... I am so impressed with KTV in Taiwan... even Dave was impressed, which says a lot since he's in the land where KTV was born (Japan)

then we went for hot spring at the 八煙溫泉會館 Ba-Ian Hot Spring Resort on a Saturday... my first Hot Spring experience and a really cool one... the place was in the middle of another mountain 金山 so while soaking we could see outside to the vast amoun of greenery...
and we ordered the package that came with lunch, which was a Japanese meal with a lot of dishes! here's Dave posing with his Unagi lunch set... there was rice, salad, cold tofu with sea urchin sauce, curry fried chicken, mushroom soap and pickled fish with lots of roe...

So we got back to Taipei city at about 3pm and since it was Dave's last day in Taiwan, we had to try something very Taiwanese... which led us to...
Ding Tai Fung 鼎泰丰 for dinner! This is our basket of fish dumplings and a bit of our vege dish... Aside from really tasty food (it tastes better than the Singapore one), I was really impressed by the service quality because

• when I submitted our orders (you get to place your order while waiting for your seat), the waitress asked if I was new and recommended their Xiao Long Bao... I told her my friend doesn't take pork and she went through our other orders and pointed out that the shrimp dumplings came with pork. She then proceeded to inform me which ones didn't contain pork
• The queue was really long as usual and we were told we would have to wait about 45 mins. But 30 mins into waiting, another waitress came up to us and asked if we were ok to share a bigger table with other guests. We said ok and were ushered in.
• Turns out they placed us at an international table as the other guests who arrived were all Japanese... so all the waitresses and waitors who served our table were the ones who could speak fluent Japanese (and English of course, since they didn't know Dave is "from Japan" too)
• when our 1st dish arrived, the waitress checked our order list and confirmed if we did order a pork bun... which meant she actually knew that ours was the sort of "don't eat pork" type... and this was a different waitress from the one at the door.. so they have really efficient communication throughout the whole restaurant!

and finally, after our sumptious dinner with great service, we headed to Ice Monster 冰館 for some dessert: Mixed Fruit Ice! We were both so full after that :)

So it has been a bunch of very fulfilling days and meals.. isn't it great when friends visit? :)