It’s been ages since my last update, so I’ll give you a superquick runthrough of what I’ve been up to. In the past month, I:

• crammed for my final projects and exams.
• got featured on Smashing Magazine’s May wallpaper showcase.
• finished my junior year of university.
• got an apartment in NY with two friends for the summer.
• flew back home to Shanghai.
• went to the Shanghai 2010 World Expo.
• went to Taiwan last weekend.

The last few weeks of school are always horrendous, because there’s one thing piling on top of another, and if you’re absolute pants at time management like I am, you end up pulling all-nighters and putting off tasks such as … um, updating this blog. But no matter! I mean, I rant about academia enough in real life to the point of annoyance, so let’s talk about something fun. Like the my Taiwan trip last weekend!

My mom and I were in Taipei for three days, where we visited a couple museums and temples, like the Chiang Kai-Shek and the Sun Yat-sen memorials. In a way, it was like revisiting my China Civ history class again. I mean, come on — in the gift shop, they were selling plastic dolls of a baby Chiang Kai-Shek in a diaper.

Oh yeah, we also happened to eat ridiculous amounts of food. Grass jelly, boba, stinky tofu, shaved ice, steamed buns … you name it. One thing that Taipei is known for is the night market. Street vendors have stands and stands of snacks that usually total less than $1 USD each.

Like these steamed pork buns!

Or these pancakes…

…or these noodles. Oodles of noodles!

I was mad bloated by the time I walked out of the market — and this was just the street food. We also ended up eating splendidly delicious things like:

…red bean cakes. There’s a stand where they bake the dough on the spot, and then they add the filling of your choice, whether it be red bean, vanilla cream, coconut, minced pork, or whathaveyou. And then they wrap the dough and filling into this nifty cake like you see here! The cake dough is also amazingly light and fluffy so it doesn’t sit in your stomach and leave you with the feeling that you suddenly gained 38 pounds.

Vietnamese spring rolls

… and grass jelly, taro, & red bean dessert at Meet Fresh. It might not look aesthetically pleasing from the photo above, but it was amazingly good, like eating bubble tea in a bowl with extra bubbles. It had the chewy tapioca-like texture and the sweet taste of a coffee-coconut-taro-hybrid. A bit like the sago I had a while back in Singapore, I might add.

Taipei was a refreshing change from Shanghai and New York. For one, it’s cleaner. Like, you get fined if you eat or drink or even chew gum on the subway. And there are so many bikes. Every time I crossed the street, cars weren’t so much the issue when there were 2384993 motorcycles and scooters zooming past me. Too bad the weather isn’t much different from Shanghai’s usual muggy heat. Though honestly, who cares when you have TONS of good food. Clearly I’ve got my priorities straight.

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