just to see you smile

while allen was in the rest room for all of 3 seconds, i unwrapped half of my sushi triangle in the middle of the MRT and was just about to take a bite when he came out yelling MEGAN NOOO!
apparently you can't bend the no eating in the MRT rule, so we wrapped it inside a print out of the national palace museum he had in his bag and saved it until we got out.
2 hours or so later he said 'i'll tell you a story. one time, this crazy girl was eating a sushi triangle inside the MRT. i think her name was megan..'
we saw everything inside that museum today. you couldn't take a single picture anywhere inside, so you'll have to just imagine the miles of hand painted scrolls, bazillions of things made out of jade, and thousand year old ceramics. (or just click on any of those links).
it's interesting to be in a place with a bunch of foreigners in it. half of me felt oddly homesick and half of me wanted to speak all kinds of chinese and show that i'm not a visitor.

the big exhibition was this apparently very famous jade bok choy. we decided we could take it or leave it. in my opinion, the coolest thing in the museum was another food made out of jade.. a chunk of 'pork meat'. the plaquard mentioned how it was amazing because of the way the artist made the layers look like real fat.
have you ever seen a black swan before?

(these are from the garden just to the side of the museum).
after the garden, we headed to ximending. there were a bazillllion people. we stopped in this place called meet fresh that has traditional desserts. it's ice topped with herbal jelly topped with taro and mango ..what i would describe as gnochi.. i dunno, it's made of rice flour. then you pour cream all over the top of it.
i've always walked past it and never had the guts to order anything, so i'm glad we tried it out. i probably wont be headed back too soon, but it was much better than i had imagined. on a hot day its pretty nice to eat something so cold and not overly sweet.

once it started to get dark, we hopped on a train to shilin night market. it's taipei's big night market. this woman is getting her ear wax sucked out of her head with a paper cone lit on fire.
oyster omelets are one of taiwan's traditional night market things.
twbf and i had the best time. we have about a million inside jokes now including 'megan, follow me. this way' like my own personal tour guide. and we compared notes on all of the taiwanese/american animal noises.
it gets much more interesting when you move beyond the getting to know you stuff. i was a little afraid that my sarcasm would never make it through the language barriers, but it did. turns out that he has a very similar sense of humor.

oodles of noodles! waiting to be cooked.
oh! i ate soup with pork intestines in it at ay-chung flour rice noodle. it's apparently famous in taipei and there are no tables, you just stand around with a bowl in your hand. i didn't ask what the chunks in it were until i had finished eating it.. you think you can get swine flu that way? ;)
i offered up some american culture at the end of the day with french fries dipped in ice cream, a first for him. good day. we even hugged at the end.