You know what? I'll stick the barbeque into the photos/portal webpage I set up some other day instead of writing a blog about it.
Because today I went to Ximending after school with my taiwanese classmastes to have some fun.
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Ximending is by far the most popular place in Taipei amongst young people. It's not the most important of Taiwanese shopping culture, but it's probably the best candidate for a youth related subcultures center. It's the place you go after school with your friends, not only because it's not really too far away from most schools in Taipei City, but also because it's the place that's the most fun if you're part of the younger generations. It's also called the Harajuku of Taiwan for some pretty good reasons. Mainly because it's very japanese influenced I think.
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Actually I'm just going to write short about my day. This is not going to be a big article on Ximending full of research. While navigating through, the girls spotted some newly opened shoestore.
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... Selling little pink shoes for anarchists?
(Yeah, actually it's some new brand mark, but there's not a lot of difference eh? Doesn't make it any better that the brand name is acupuncture. For a shoe brand...)
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Later we went and got some Lattea at a cafe by the same name in the topmost floor inside one of the big department stores for fashion clothes and books. Zoom in on the photo above and see if you can retrieve some engrish lulz.
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That's the stuff we drank up there. It's called Lattea because it's kinda like Cafe Latte with tea instead of coffee. Except it's really just a little layer of cream in the top. For some reason, the cream in the top is salty. And then cream doesn't really go well with cold tea either in my opinion. So actually, I'm not really thinking of ever tasting this kind of tea again. That cream with salt or whatever they put in was gross. (I can tell you it's not because of the green powder you can see in the top though. That's just dried green tea which you can't really taste anyway. The waiter told me it's just to make the tea not look completely white in the top, because apparently white is ugly?)
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I can assure you, this is nothing beer related at all. And please don't let me scare you from trying this yourself if you get the chance. It's still a quite unique culinary experience and who knows if you're going to like it, right?
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Yeah, I did finish mine anyway. I paid for it already and I was thirsty. Actually there was a hair in my first glass so I instantly got another drink. Therefore I kinda owed the girl making the drinks to give it a chance since she made two of them for ones price.
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ORLY?
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Finally we went to another big department store, which seemed much more Japanese flavored with a lot of otaku-style accessories, miniature figures of anime characters and such. This one had an arcade game nest in the top floor where we spent the most of the evening.
Above is the scores two of my classmates got in a competition. My score was only 165 points. -.-
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Places like this are always very noisy, but that's how most of Taipei usually is anyway. It's nonetheless a quite interesting place, especially because it's mainly equipped with big Japanese electronic toys - which are not very often seen in Denmark, and especially not in a high tech fashion like this.
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It's not eyepokingly expensive either. You buy coins for 5 NT$/piece and then use usually 3 or 4 for a game there that could take between 3 and 10 minutes probably.
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We found this relatively new game there, which I was quite impressed about. On the machine you can read "Konami 2008" aswell as Jubeat Ripples, which is the name. It is a kind of crossover between dance dance revolution and whack a mole. (Wikipedia link: UBeat.)
Actually the game seem quite simple when you look from distance, but it's not just like moles coming up at random for you to click. Little shutters will appear in a certain pattern depending on the song. You will then have to click them as they close to the beat. Clicking too fast or too slow will do you no good. Furthermore there's a wide range of difficulty levels and you can even play online (yeah, it's an arcade machine game) and get a kind of experience points and unlock new songs. You can only save your progress if you buy a special card for it though. What a clever idea for the money making manufacturers.
That's one of my classmates playing the game for the first time. Doesn't look really exciting but sure is I can tell you. And it's quite cheap actually. Just 20 NT$ for 3 songs - that's the same price you can get a single song for in most karaoke vending machines.
Right left to her, another girl was playing in a pretty crazy speed by herself. Sure looked a lot of fun to me. You could barely see her fingers.
As a matter of fact, I was quite good at the game too, even though it was my first time.
Some day soon I'm probably going back there again. I would like to take a look at some of the figures and stuff related aswell.
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I hope your lives are going well back in Denmark and around the world in general. (Hey, I have visitors from almost everywhere already.) :)
Thank you all for the attention. Come for a visit some time.