Weekend Day-off

My feet were exhausted from the previous day's walking all over Mao Kong so it was nice that we took a break today.  For lunch all of the housemates took Ali's car to grandma's house in Taoyuan.  She had cooked us Taro congee for lunch!  It was yummy and she served it with this soy cheese topping and also pickled whole ginger.

After hanging out at her place for a while we left to go to the down town of Taoyuan.  We walked to a bakery to see what sorts of Taiwanese desserts Johan could buy Rebecca's mom as a gift.  There were so many delicious things in the bakery!  My mom would have had a hay-day.  This place I think was also a bit more expensive because many things were being sold for $1-$2 per item.  Is that actually expensive?  I don't really frequent bakeries very often in Canada.  Either way I bought a small little traditional cake thing filled with pineapple and an egg yolk.  Ya sounds weird but I enjoyed it.

After the bakery we wandered around for another hour or so to find Johan some new casual shoes.  His current "casuals" were a bit too fancy.  Anyways we found some shoes and proceeded on to diner.  It was sort of like a budget Tepanyaki place where they cook everything on a flat metal grill at your table, except this place only had the grill at the bar, and there was no seating for 4 people (it was busy at the bar).  Johan and I ordered the lamb and Ali and Niki ordered the beef.  It wasn't super crazy delicious but for $4 it hit the spot and was quite tasty.  The lamb/beef was cooked in some sort of garlic sauce and placed on a bed of bean sprouts with the heartless-veggie on the side.  It also came with a bowl of rice, a little egg/green onion appetizer, and simple soup.

i'm not sure why the lighting on the beef looks so bad in
this photo.  It actually looked better in real life :P