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That's one of the entrances into Ximending. I went there with my classmates yesterday. It reads Shimen in Latin letters, but you know... There's a very good reason why Taiwan has it's own system of phonetic characters instead of the Latin alphabet. Actually, Xi means west. Men means door. So Ximen is actually the location of the west door of old Taipei.
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This is one of the more popular places in Taipei so they have bus-stops equipped with screens that will tell you when the next bus will arrive. Neat.
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The students at my school always gets off from school at 5pm. I've only seen one occasion in which they got off at 4pm so far. So since the sun already goes down pretty quickly, you won't see much of Ximending in daylight. Anyway, the place is really too much more awesome during the nighttime so there's no reason to be sad.
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But oh well. Went to eat quite quickly after we got there because everyone were oh so hungry. Stupid Taiwanese. Always eat so much and I have to do aswell. So I gain weight really fast if I don't watch out really good.
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The place we're at here is actually the same building as the one with the arcade game hall we went to the other day and again later on this day. In most (all) department stores, you can go one floor below ground level and you will find a lot of places to eat. The funny thing about the place we're in here is that they have a second floor inside the restaurant that is below first floor. A really small place with a damn narrow entrance.
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I think it's somewhere between the floors actually, since the ground floor is pretty stuffed already. It's a really cozy place anyway.
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Someone's happy today.
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So, the restaurant would serve us not only red and green tea for free, but also give their customers this while they're waiting for the food they ordered. This is some sort of corn soup with pepper and azn stuffs. Tastes sweet and not bad.
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At the store you can eat a number of dishes all prepared like this. They vary between noodle or rice with chicken, pork or beef and can be spicy or nonspicy. When you get the dish it's still frying on the hot plate below so don't put your fingers on it.
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This is just 100 NT$. That's a little more than 3 US$ or 15 DKK. It's beef, noodle, DIY fried egg (lol) and a lot of black pepper plus the corn and unknown sauce you can see all over it. Free HongCha in the cup.
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And then comes the Arcade gaming. The guy sitting further from the camera has the English name Andy. He is also called Onion and FeiFei which is the name of a kind of monkey. He's also the class leader.
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That's actually no surprise to me. Mario Kart on an arcade machine. I wonder if Mario Kart was perhaps out on an arcade machine before it went onto the consoles? This is not exactly one of the older versions though.
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Behind the Jubeat Ripple machines you find this. This is some other sort of Japanese rhythm game in another fashion. Maybe I should try that one the next time. This one also has cute little anime for each song that will play on the screen. (Click the picture above to get a bigger version. This will also get you to a page where you can browse through all the pictures I took that day. (This way you can see more pictures of every arcade game than I'm showing in the blog if you're interested.
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Seems this is a kind of japanese style hyped guitar hero on a touch pad with two screens instead of a guitar. DDR meets Guitar Hero maybe? (Well, actually a lot of this stuff probably existed long time before Guitar Hero anyway.)
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Yeah. A lot of people went tonight.
Last time I showed you how a newbie would play Jubeat Ripples. Now here's a pro, also one of my classmates. Actually he's playing the same song as my other classmate whom I put in a youtube video earlier. Difference is that he's playing on the hardest level. Actually I just went and bought a card this day. (Hey, it costs almost nothing really.) And as Andy came to the place a little later I found out he had one aswell. And he had used it pretty damn much already. He is on the A grade while I'm just only on C7 I think. Now I have no idea what that means but they're kind of like levels in the game. Just watch the youtube vid and you will see.
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Let me finish off with Ximendings impressing shopping streets. May you have a nice nights sleep.
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