We visit the East Coast for a long weekend to attend the wedding of Angela’s cousin, Albert. The day before the wedding, Jan meets up with his brother Chris and step-brother Stephen to visit Marlee in Briarcliff Manor. Marlee moved to an assisted living home there late last year after she was diagnosed with a form of dementia. It’s a terrible disease, but for today at least, she’s still in many way recognizably her old self. The three of us take her to lunch at The Patio, a restaurant just down the street. Chris orders a chocolate milkshake with his lunch, then shares half of it with Marlee, who gives it her approval. Afterwards we make a short walk to a grassy area by the town’s swimming pool.
While Jan’s visiting Marlee, Angela leads the girls on a train adventure from Bridgewater, NJ, towards the town of Hawthorne. Her goal is to meet up with Jan there so that the five of us can visit our friends Owen and Nicole. Unfortunately, a missed train connection strands them in Newark, and they have to take a cab the rest of the way.
We eventually all arrive at Owen and Nicole’s house, and enjoy a pleasant few hours catching up with them. Nicole describes one of her latest projects: creating a wire fence barricade around the backyard — both above and below ground — to keep out a persistent woodchuck that’s been ravaging the perennials. Owen’s convinced the varmint will inevitably make it through the fence. When Nicole takes the girls out back to see the fence, the girls point out a hole in the fence the woodchuck (or some other critter) has made.
At a wedding rehearsal dinner in the evening, we meet up with Angela’s cousin, Albert, and get to meet his fiancee Maggie. There are also a large number of Chen family relations present, including a handful that have come from Taiwan.
We get dressed up for Albert and Maggie’s wedding, and Angela has fun putting her hair up.
After a wedding service at the Polish Catholic church, we enjoy a nice reception. Bree is especially delighted to be able to spend time with her L.A. cousins Anthony and Brian this weekend.
A high point of the reception is getting to dance with Bree, who makes a crown of glowsticks.
As we’re leaving the reception, we get to watch a bit of Fourth of July fireworks going off nearby.
Back at home in Seattle, Jan and Anya rig up a “Ring on a String” game Nicole gave us. The magnolia tree in the front yard seems the best place for it. We give it a try, and it’s simple but pretty fun — you just try to swing a metal ring suspended on a string so that it hits or, ideally, catches on a hook. Anya is overjoyed to get the ring to catch on the hook.
Sabriya’s 8th birthday! We celebrate by going to a matinee showing of the latest Studio Ghibli movie, “When Marnie was There”. Bree’s a little scared by a couple of the scenes, but enjoys the movie overall. Afterwards we go downtown for a pizza dinner at Serious Pie. Jan gives Bree a piggyback ride to the restaurant just because he still can.
We leave for Japan and Taiwan. The main focus of the trip is Taiwan, where Angela will spend four weeks with the girls as they attend a summer Mandarin school/camp. But first we’ll spend a week in Japan. Jan’s particularly looking forward to seeing whether his Japanese studies since the last time (two years ago) have made any difference.
Actually, Liya has also spent a bit of time studying for this trip. A few weeks ago, Jan suggested to her that she might have fun studying katakana, the Japanese alphabet used to represent English words. It appears everywhere in signage, advertising, and restaurant menus. Liya had fun using Jan’s flashcard app to memorize the 50 or so katakana letters, and so she’s eager to see if she can read anything.
Liya gets her first chance to read Japanese katakana we’re checking in for our ANA flight. She studies a large sign near the check-in counter, and then excitedly announces, “That says, ‘Business Class’! And that says ‘Economy Class’!”
The girls are getting better at long flights, so the flight isn’t too hard. But when we get off at Narita Airport, they make an announcement that Angela Miksovsky has to speak with a gate agent about something. We can’t find a gate agent anywhere. After walking quite a ways away from the gate, Angela goes all the way back to the gate, where she finally finds someone. They say something about a piece of possibly lost luggage, and check her passport. When we leave the gate area and walk a looooong way to immigration, Angela discovers that the person she spoke with never returned her passport. She has to run all the way back to the gate again. Everyone’s exhausted, and the extra delay makes everyone even grumpier, but finally everything is straightened out.
Before leaving the airport, we decide to try using one of the Japanese shipping services to send a particularly large bag of ours that contains stuff we’ll only need in Taiwan. It takes just a few minutes to send the bag on to Haneda Airport. We’ll pick it up there when we depart for Taiwan in a week’s time.
That done, we head for the train to Tokyo. Anya immediately checks out the platform news-and-snacks kiosk to see which flavor of Hi-Chew candies are currently being sold this season. The most interesting one is crunchy sour lemon.
We take the train to Shinjuku, then a cab to the hotel. We all collapse.
As usual on an overseas trip, Bree is the first to wake up — at 2:00 am. We’re all up by 5:00 am. We kill some time before going out for breakfast. Past experience has taught us that there’s nowhere nearby to get breakfast that early except a convenience store, so we head straight for a Family Mart convenience store across a corner of Shinjuku Central Park from our hotel.
We all have fun picking out pastries, rice balls, and other stuff to eat. Anya’s particularly happy with a creamy sponge cake she finds. We take everything across the street to the park, eat our breakfast sitting on a park bench, and then the girls play on the playground equipment.
Back at the hotel, we take a dip in the swimming pool. Bree’s become a much better swimmer since the last time we were here, so she can join her sisters in playing around.
We take the train to Ginza to visit the Itoya stationery store. The girls thoroughly enjoyed shopping there the last time, when the store was in the middle of a remodel. This time is also fun, although perhaps not quite as much — now that the remodel’s finished, many of the departments are just slightly too high-end to be fun to shop in. We liked it better when everything was chock-a-block together in a more humble temporary setting. We all like the store’s origami displays, though.
We have lunch at the cafe on the store’s top floor. We’re amused by a sign advertising, “Fruffy Pancakes”. All the girls order the fruffy pancakes, but they’re only moderately fruffy.
Another odd thing about the cafe is that they advertise a “farm” that’s described as being one floor down from the cafe. Hmm? We investigate. There is, in fact, a hydroponic farm one floor down. A long hallway is lined with windows that look through to shelves and shelves of lettuce plants.
Back to the hotel for a nap, and then we’re met at the hotel by our friends, Kei and Mayuko, along with their two young boys, Kosuke and Ryotaro. We walk across the street to the park playground, the same one we visited very early in the morning. Now it’s packed with families, and much, much hotter. Kei and Mayuko take us to dinner at a Chinese restaurant near Shinjuku Gyoen park. During dinner, exhaustion catches up with Anya, and she starts nodding off during the meal.
The weather’s a little clearer this morning, and Liya spots Mt. Fuji in the hazy distance. We have breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Everyone’s looking forward to the poached eggs, which look so perfect. We eventually work out that they must be poaching the eggs in their shells.
Today’s expedition is to the Tokyo SkyTree tower. We’ve never been there — it was only completed a few years ago. Walking through the mall from the SkyTree station to the tower itself, we happen to pass a store specializing in goods branded by animation makers Studio Ghibli. The store personnel open up the store just as we pass, tempting us inside. It’s fun to browse the huge variety of things they have on offer.
Bree buys a Totoro fan with sunflowers on it. It matches her dress.
After enduring lines at the SkyTree tower’s base and the first observation level, we eventually arrive at the tower’s top observation level. It’s got a nice 360-degree view.
We get a nice view of Mt. Fuji in the distance.
The most interesting part of SkyTree observation deck is an area with a glass floor. It’s a bit unnerving to walk on, and especially unnerving if one jumps up and down.
The last stop in the SkyTree area is the Sumida Aquarium, which turns out to be great. We all like one exhibit showing teeny-tiny baby jellyfish. But the highlight of the aquarium is the indoor penguin exhibit. It’s large, full of penguins zooming around underwater and, surprisingly, is immaculately clean. We watch a penguin feeding, which is immediately followed by a cleaning operation. Apparently, the exhibit’s cleaned every two hours.
At the hotel, we visit the pool again. Earlier, we’d bumped into a man from our Madison Park neighborhood back in Seattle. He’s at the pool with his two kids, and they teach our girls how to play “Silent Marco Polo”. Greg and all five kids play many, many rounds of this game.
We have Korean barbecue for dinner at Jojoen at nearby Opera City. It’s good, but tonight it’s Bree’s turned to be exhausted, and she needs to be carried back to the hotel. (A good thing we can still — just barely — carry her.)
Our plan for the morning is to walk through the Japanese garden at Shinjuku Gyoen. We’ve been strolling along for about two minutes when Anya begins complaining that she doesn’t want to go on a “hike”. Angela points out that what we’re doing is literally a walk in the park. It’s pretty warm, so we stop for drinks and ice cream at a little teahouse overlooking a lawn.
In the middle of the afternoon, we visit the nice cafe on the ground floor of the hotel.
We take the train to Shibuya, then to walk across Shibuya Crossing to the Seibu Loft store. The girls have fun looking at all the knick-knacks. Liya falls for a big blue whale pillow, which the girls collectively buy and name, “Moby”. Much debate ensues over a fair schedule for who gets Moby and when. We have lunch at an Italian place up the narrow street around the corner, then go back to Loft so Anya can pick out some nice drawing pens. We also check out the Muji store next door.
We return to Shibuya in the evening to eat at the Akiyoshi kushiyaki (grilled or fried stuff on skewers) restaurant in Sakuragaoka. The food is a reasonably good hit with the girls, whose favorites are the fried lotus root and the grilled rice balls.
We have breakfast at the Cafe Excelsior in the hotel building’s basement mall, then take the train out to Mitaka to visit the Studio Ghibli animation museum. The girls loved the museum last time, and have been looking forward to exploring it again. This time, the movie playing in the museum’s theatre is, “Mon-Mon the Water Spider”, which turns out to be pretty good, and much more coherent than the movie we saw last time.
When we get back to Shinjuku, Anya says she wants to do some other activity that “we can only do in Japan” before going back to the hotel. We stop by the station’s Tokyu Hands store and look for more products one wouldn’t find back home.
Dinner is Brazilian churrasco at the Shinjuku branch of Barbacoa. The girls have been looking forward to this meal for months, and it meets everyone’s expectations.
While in Japan, Bree’s doing her own Japanese activity of sorts: a Japanese iPhone game called Nekoatsume (“Cat Gathering”). It’s a simulation of a Japanese garden in which you to try set out cat food and cat toys in order to attract cute little animated cats. The user interface is in Japanese, but fairly simple, and Bree masters it quickly. Bree asks Jan constantly throughout the day if she can check to see whether any virtual cats have come.
After checking out of the hotel, we eat lunch at the last of the restaurants Jan was hoping to visit on this trip: a small gyoza restaurant called Shi-An in the basement of Shinjuku Park Tower. Anya doesn’t want gyoza, but spots a Subway sandwich shop around the corner. Jan orders lunch for her so she can have what she wants before joining the rest of us at Shi-An. It takes him a while to explain Anya’s standard Subway order to the staff. Aparently, no one’s ever ordered a pickle-and-cheese sandwich here before, but happily Anya eventually gets a sandwich that meets her approval.
We take the shinkansen from Shinjuku to Mishima, then a small local train all the way down to the town of Shuzenji on the Izu Peninsula. Our destination is a traditional Japanese ryokan inn called Asaba. It’s really old: founded in the 1600s, and still run by the 13th generation of the same family. Our room turns out to be really nice, and looks out over a small pond.
Before dinner, we make trips to the baths. The outdoor bath (with separate times for men and women) has an amazing view overlooking a pond, a wisteria arbor, and a lush hillside covered with bamboo.
The only conceivable downside to this particular ryokan is that they don’t offer a Western-style dinner for kids. For dinner, all five of us get a traditional kaiseki course menu. Jan had asked ahead for them to skip the sashimi course for the girls, since they’d be unlikely to touch it. By far, the favorite item on the menu is a corn tempura, which is excellent. This is listed on the menu as “Fried Cone”. The accompanying “Cone Soup” is also delicious.
After the corn, Bree’s favorite is, surprisingly, a grilled fish dish. Jan and Angela get a different fish: two small broiled ayu served whole. Jan tries eating his the recommended way: head to tail. The organs just behind the fish’s head turn out to be intolerably bitter. Angela wisely ignores the waitstaff’s advice, and just eats the tail and body.
Anya is tired, and leaves halfway through meal to go to sleep. Jan’s worried that the ryokan staff will be offended, but they’re nonplussed, and simply start bringing all of Anya’s dishes to Jan. Jan’s dessert is pretty interesting: semi-transparent noodles made from kudzu vine, dipped in a brown sugar syrup.
When the rest of us return to the room, we discover that Anya’s put herself to sleep on a futon — but not the designated futon she’d previously negotiated with Liya. A long, late-evening row ensues over who gets to sleep in which futon. Luckily, there don’t appear to be any guests in the adjacent rooms who would have been kept up by this argument.
Anya’s content to spend nearly all her time in the room, so the remaining four of us go out for a morning walk along the river near the inn. The town has marked out a walking tour that passes through a beautiful bamboo grove. It’s raining on and off, but in a way that just makes it prettier.
The walking path crosses over the river on red wooden bridges.
The path arrives at a public foot bath fed by local hot springs. The foot bath is fun, but really, really hot.
We have lunch at a soba restaurant near the inn. One of the inn staff had mentioned a soba place nearby, and later we saw this same person ducking into this particular restaurant, so we figured it must be the right place. It’s good.
Here’s Liya back at the gate to the ryokan.
We hang out for a bit at the ryokan’s lounge that overlooks a pond.
Dinner tonight is shabu-shabu (hot pot). After the long course menu last night, we’re all looking forward to something simpler. It turns out the shabu-shabu is preceded by six courses of other dishes. Everything’s good, but we’re all stuffed by the time the main hot pot course is served.
Today Jan seems to be coming down with a cold. We don’t have any cold medicine with us, so Jan and Angela take a cab to a pharmacy in the main area of town. Jan gets some help picking out a cold medicine, which doesn’t seem to be do much good. Maybe it’s allergies instead.
Later in the afternoon, Angela shows Bree how to make green tea. Bree makes a cup for Jan.
We take one last trip to the baths, have a quick breakfast, then take a series of trains to Haneda Airport for our flight to Taipei. Before boarding our flight, we have lunch at an airport ramen shop — while there’s much better ramen to be found, the girls are happy to finally get a chance to eat ramen in Japan.
Arriving In Taipei, we’re met by a driver who takes us to the apartment Angela’s relatives found for us. At one point, the driver turns onto a street packed with people. This turns out to be Yongkang Street, where the apartment is located. (The entrance is off Lane 33.) Yongkang, it transpires, is a pretty popular area for food and stores.
We’re met outside the apartment by two women, Amber and Eva, from the apartment rental company. The company is owned by Christians that rent apartments as part of their mission — they gave us a discount because Angela is a pastor!
Also waiting for us there are Angela’s cousin Ike, his wife Penny, and their kids Leslie and Eddie. It’s funny — we saw them just two weeks ago at a family wedding in New Jersey, and now we’re together again in Taipei!
Amber and Eva show us around the apartment, and explain how to operate the air condition, the appliances, etc. The air conditioning is especially important: it’s very, very hot and humid in Taipei during the summer.
We unpack for a bit, then go out to dinner with Ike and Penny’s family at a ramen store down the street. Ramen again!
After dinner, we go shopping for food for breakfast at an underground Matsusei supermarket. As usual, we have fun trying to find simple things like 2% milk. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that Taiwan sells many flavors of Oreo cookies, way more than we’ve seen in the U.S.
Our lane off Yongkang Street.
Ike comes back in the morning to walk with us to the school where the girls will be studying Mandarin. The school, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU, usually called 師大, Shīdà), is known for its Mandarin Training Center. The Center runs two four-week sessions of summer Mandarin camp each year, and the girls will be taking the second session.
The school is very close to the apartment, about a 10 minute walk away. After we find the building where camp registration will be tomorrow, we also visit the university pool, and Angela gets a short-term membership so she can take the girls swimming.
The Mango Snowflake is pretty good. (And big!)
It begins to rain, so we’re happy to have scored some outdoor stools under the restaurant awning.
We eat lunch back on Yongkang Street at a well-known Taiwanese restaurant, 度小月擔仔麵. It’s famous for its noodles, but the noodles just seem okay. Jan sees one dish on the menu printed as “Petitioes and Peanuts”. He assumes it must be a misspelling of “Potatoes and Peanuts”, and orders it. It turns out to be pigs’ feet and peanuts. Maybe they were trying to write “Petit toes”?
After lunch, we get in line to order shaved ice at Smoothie House. We’ve already gone past this place several times, and there’s always a huge line of people waiting to order the “Mango Snowflake”: cubes of mango, shaved ice, mango sauce, and a lump of mango sorbet (or blanc mange) on top.
Walking home, the rain really begins to come down — it’s typhoon season.
We don’t have enough umbrellas for everyone, so we stop at an upscale umbrella store. Naturally, it’s completely naturally packed with people who were caught in the rain. Angela and Bree by light umbrellas that can double as parasols.
At the apartment, Angela’s cousin Allen comes to visit. Later, a family friend named Mrs. Chen comes by to take us to dinner, she invites Allen to join us. Allen agrees, and drives us across town to a Thai restaurant named Sukhothai. The food’s pretty good, but the girls spend most of the meal reading books.
First day of Mandarin Summer Camp. We walk with the girls to the Mandarin Training Center at NTNU and go through the simple procedure to get them registered. Once everyone’s registered, the staff give a lengthy introduction in both Mandarin and English. Then the girls go off for an initial skills test — all three girls will be in the first (lowest) level.
Angela and Jan stick around for a more detailed briefing on the camp schedule, then head off to Din Tai Fung for lunch. It’s not quite as special a treat as it was before the restaurant opened two branches in the Seattle area, but it’s still very good.
After lunch, we buy Easy Card passes for the MRT subway, then visit the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. It’s an imposing edifice, but surprisingly light on actual exhibits. Jan’s favorite: a small paper card Sun Yat-Sen wrote after he’d been captured in England by agents of imperial China. He wrote a quick note to an English friend saying, very politely, that he’d been captured. He kindly requested immediate rescue, if it wasn’t too much trouble, or else he would probably be executed.
On our way out of the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall park, we notice a reflexology bench. The ground directly in front of the bench is covered with smooth but prominent rocks. This sort of thing looks appealing, but is actually painful.
We have a quick drink to cool off at Doutor Coffee, then go back to NTNU to pick up the girls. They didn’t do much in the afternoon, mostly watched YouTube videos in Mandarin. Since Anya missed out on a Mango Snowflake at Smoothie House yesterday, Angela and Bree take Anya there so she can have one herself.
As a break from Japanese and Taiwanese cuisine, for dinner we all walk to a Pizza Hut near the school. It’s mostly a To-Go location, and not really set up for dining in. But they do have some stools, and don’t seem to mind us ravenously devouring the pizzas in the store. Like the Pizza Huts in Japan, the pizza seems to taste better than the Pizza Huts in the States. Dinner is followed by more grocery shopping.
While the girls are in school, Jan and Angela head to Maokong, a hilly area at the edge of Taipei. We take a long (4km) gondola ride up and down a series of hills and over some temples to arrive at a terminal hilltop station. The area is famous for its tea plantations and teahouse restaurants. We walk in the steamy midday heat to visit a building described as “Three Stones Teapot Museum”. We finally find it, but it’s pathetic, so we take a bus back to the gondola station.
We find a promising teahouse restaurant: it has both a significant number of customers and air conditioning. The menu’s entirely in Chinese, so we do our best taking pictures of the menu with Google Translate. We manage to order a number of dishes: mountain garlic shoots and pork, kung pao chicken, dried string beans, fried rice with tea leaves. It’s all fantastic.
On the gondola ride back down, we take a “Crystal Cabin” glass-bottom gondola car.
By the time we get back to the apartment, the weather has gotten very, very hot and humid.
In the evening, we walk to a small Shida night market. There are lots of stands grilling mystery items on sticks, or selling mystery bowls, but the girls aren’t in an experimental mood.
We end up eating pastries from a bakery. Anya buys a dessert that looks a seedling in a tiny flower pot. It’s tiramisu, with a mint garnish.
When we’re done eating and start to head home, we’re accosted by some students who are trying to enter some sort of international friendship club. As part of their initiation, they need to find some foreigners and sing a song for them. We’re okay with that.
Morning drop-off at Mandarin language camp.
Jan and Angela rent bikes at a municipal bike rental stand. Our goal is to bike down to the Xindian River, then along the riverside park. As we get close to the river, we find our way blocked by a huge elevated highway that stretches far in either direction. This later proves to be a flood control dike, which explains the lack of underpasses. We have to push our bikes up and over a long pedestrian overpass to get to the riverside park. This is hard work in the heat. The temperature is about 95°F, with very high humidity. (“Feels like 110°F”, says the cheerful weather app.)
After just a couple of miles biking down the river, we’re tired and thirsty. We abandon the riverside park and find a cold drink vending machine. From there, we bike to the closest bike rental return point. This happens to be Longshan Temple, so while there we take a quick peek.
We have lunch at the Sogo department store food court, then check out the Eslite bookstore, then head back to the Yongkang area. We stop to pick up ingredients for a dinner of hiyashi chuka (cold Chinese noodles).
Afternoon pick-up from Mandarin camp. While Jan’s picking up the girls, Angela preps dinner. The chilled noodles make a perfect dinner on a hot night, followed by some of the mangoes from the big box of fruit Mr. Chen dropped off.
Jan begins the long journey back to Seattle. He’ll get some work in during the three weeks the girls have left in Mandarin camp, and will also do a week-long backpacking trip with his brother Chris. The girls are sad to say goodbye.
Angela heard about this theme restaurant from another parent at the Mandarin program the girls are attending and finally managed to drag the girls to it. Modern Toilet…all the food and drinks is served in some version of a toilet bowl, with a bit of chocolate soft serve to top it off.
After dinner, Angela and the girls got to explore a new neighborhood in Taipei: Ximen. It’s a happening place (overheard: the ‘Times Square’ of Taipei) and Angela vows to return.
Angela and the girls make the trek to KenTing, the southern most tip of Taiwan. Anya and Liya remember a resort we went to the last time we came, and have been begging to return since then. After arriving in ZuoYing, they successfully navigate the gamut of aggressive drivers “offering” to take them wherever they want to find the shuttle bus to Yoho Beach Resort. Angela is a little worried that the place won’t live up to the memories, but thankfully that worry is alleviated as soon as we walk in and see the glorious pools and rooms.
One of the funnest parts of living in Taipei is finding great food. Angela comes across a typical Taiwanese Cafeteria which brings back great memories of her college summers in Taipei. She also finds a great place for beef noodle soup near their apartment. Taiwan has such yummy foods!