Hsinchu for the day

It was so nice getting to talk to all of my family this morning.  I was a bit bummed I missed out on my grandparents 60th anniversary party that my parents were hosting at their house.  Though it was really nice that I had the chance to Skype with a whole bunch of party-goers when I woke up :)

Around 10:30am the 4 of us house-mates left for Hsinchu (Nikki's home town), to meet up with her high school friends Esther and Jeremy.  The drive was very scenic and took about 45 minutes.  During the drive we passed through an industrial area where a lot of the worlds CD's and DVD's are manufactured.  It was neat getting to see an epicenter of global technology.  We are inundated by this stuff and sometimes we don't really think of where it comes from.

Once we picked up Esther, we went to a pizzeria very close to her house.  The food here was delicious and it was a welcome change to eat something from western culture.  The meal was about $8 per person which is a bit steep compared to most meals we've been having, but for $8 the meal was fantastic!  I was skeptical about Taiwanese pizza but it was some of the best flat crust pizza I've ever had.  We also ordered a salad with smoked salmon, asparagus and arugula with a lemon yogurt dressing.  The dressing almost reminded me of ice cream (in a good way).  The first pizza was a spanish pepperoni with mushrooms and red onion
and the second pizza was pepperoni with artichoke hearts, capers, olives, and mushrooms.

After lunch we headed over to a very famous bubble tea restaurant.  They claim to be the first ever bubble tea place and that they invented it.  Ali says he doesn't know if it's true, but either way I'm sure they were one of the first.  This is where we met Nikki's other friend Jeremy, who might be helping Johan and I with some programming on our next project.

In addition to bubble tea, they also had these great Mochi Bread things with red bean in them.  They were a bit chewey and really did taste like a mix between mochi and bread.  Very yummy!  Oh yah, and I had Oolong Nai Cha (Oolong Milk Tea).  The glass that it came in was giant!  Which actually turned out to be a bad thing cause I think I got some heart burn from it and I'm still suffering now 4 hours later :P

After bubble tea we drove home through Jhong Li for some sushi and now it's now!  I think now I'm going to try out some StarCraft II to get my mind off of the heart burn ;)

ps - I love this dogs shoes