Leaving Taipei - Jiufen

After much ado about this place from Khai and Fuyuko, we had to go.  It turns out that this is a regular side-trip for V's sister and her husband, and they graciously offered to take me there.  It was really like they were taking me on a field trip even though V hasn't really been there either.  *rolls eyes* 

I didn't know that this was going to be a food trip and actually ate lunch.  Big mistake.  We left in the afternoon, and we made it there in what was apparently record time.  九份 - Jiufen has an interesting history that's worth describing.  During the first years of the Qing Dynasty, only nine families lived in the village; therefore, every time they needed supplies, they requested nine portions.  Hence the name.

In the late 1800's, gold was found in the area, and the village developed into a full-fledged town.  I was really surprised how much stuff was around even though it's way up in the mountains and fairly remote.  There's actually a gold museum with a giant chunk of gold you can touch.  We got there too late for the gold museum though; what else is new?

Instead we spent the afternoon wandering the vast catacombs of Jiufen's historic shopping streets.  It's kind of ridiculous how many people were there despite it being a working day.  Random trinkets, folk arts, and grub trade shop stalls for the length of the street.  We appropriately focused purely on the food.  First stop: cupcakes.

Different from the cupcakes we're used to of course.  Light and made with honey, they have an almost mochi like consistency.  Pretty good but I feel like I've eaten something very similar before.  Much more interesting were the peanut powder ice-cream wraps. 

Very thin wraps are powdered with peanut candy grating.  Put in two scoops of ice cream and close it up...tada!  Deliciousness.  The peanut gratings come from this giant block of peanut candy.  I thought it was pretty cool.

Oh, I could have eaten five of those.  Too bad, we had too many other items on our agenda and so we continued along, saving our stomachs.  In retrospect, I could have eaten a couple more anyway.  A lot of places were repeats of each other, and I saw a lot of foods I've seen before.  Disregarding the pedestrian items, before I knew it, we hit a bend in the road.  On that corner tough, we saw some grilled mushrooms we couldn't ignore.

Anyway we can make this at home?  We can try, but I have a feeling the secret's in the sauce.  Ate our mushrooms and turned the corner; I thought the street was ending and V's sister told us the food was ending soon.  But it didn't!  It just kept on going. 

Soon after, we found one of Jiufen's staples.  People described this as made of grass, but I didn't think it tasted that grassy.  I feel like I've had something like this before and it didn't taste like anything other than red bean filled mochi. 

People were buying this stuff by the box and they had a factory of people in the back making thousands of rice balls.  Not sure what all the fuss is about.  Someone explain it to me.  Next up, meatballs.

For anyone who doesn't know, these look really weird.  This type of meatball is covered in a transparent rice-cake film.  If you think about it, it's a really easy way to make sure your meatball filling stays in place.  I'm not sure if I can define it as a meatball though.  There's gotta be a better translation, transliteration, or whatever right?  I dunno, I just think there are too many different things in Chinese food that can be called meatballs.  We need more unique descriptors.  Oh yeah, the meatball was really good. 

Jiufen is kind of like Enoshima with its population of cats.  I'm not sure why there are so many cats around, but they are disparately skinnier than Japanese strays.  Probably cuz of the weather. 

Our final stop was probably the most famous.  賴阿婆芋圓 - Grandma Lai's Yuyuan is a little bit out of the way.  V's sister led us up this random mess of stairs to the storefront.  The stairs continued all the way up to an elementary school.  I climbed up to the gates to check it out and spy on minors like I like to do from time to time.  V meanwhile yelled up to me asking if I wanted mixed beans, whatever the hell those are.  She then left me alone to do whatever the hell I was doing.

*Ahem*  Grandma Lai is famous for her taro balls and you can get them hot as a soup or cold on top of ice.  They were pretty good, but splitting one with V proved to be too much after our feeding frenzy.

Grandma Lai also has a small factory of taro ball makers.  You actually pick up your food, pass through the factory and down a strange hallway.  You continue blindly wondering where exactly this tiny place has seating and then you end up on a veranda with pretty special views.

There's something distinct about the taro ball + veranda experience.  Highly recommended.  On our way back down the stairs we passed this place selling various dried meats when V's sister pointed out what was apparently duck tongues.

WHY DO THEY LOOK SO WEIRD?  Sooo anyway, Jiufen is a bit of a hotspot for movie and drama makers.  We passed by a cafe that was used in a Korean drama.  The meandering streets were an inspiration for the town in Spirited Away, and back in the day a famous movie was made about a movie theater.  Or a movie theater was made about a famous movie.  According to V, Tony Leung had something to do with it.  Regardless, the movie theater is now defunct and looks like it's on its last legs.  Pretty sure it won't be here the next time I come.

Trying to make our way back from the movie theater proved difficult.  We got a little lost and wandered some residential areas for a while.  People live in the weirdest looking houses and it's pretty amazing how this town was constructed.  I even found a lot that looked like it belonged in a war-zone.

I was pretty done eating for the day, but that didn't stop me from getting some gold-medal pineapple cakes and a sweet potato cream puff.  Call me cynical, but I don't put much trust in an award given ten years ago from an unknown source.  Can't I just make up an award and give it to someone on a whim?  What prevents me from creating the International Pineapple Cake Award and then giving it to some old man on a corner?  Well, I'm sure people know which pineapple cake awards are truly esteemed.  Also, the place is pretty famous and popular.  Also, the pineapple cakes taste good.  BUT, I like other ones better! 

I totally passed out on the drive home.  V couldn't find my camera apparently, so she took a picture of me, mouth agape, on her sister's iPhone.  Not very comfortable with that thought...  We were skipping dinner when the call came that we should hurry over before my niece went to sleep.  Off we went in a scurry to see Anne.

I know it sounds foolish, but it amazes me how fast babies grow.  Same thing with puppies, kitties, and I guess any animal.  Cuz babies are animals.  Point is: she got big!  This is the look that she gave us when we first got there.  Baby is clearly confused wondering, "Who are these people?"  We tried all night to get her to crack a smile, but every time she did I would point the camera and she would get entranced by it.

This is the closest I got to a real smile.  Anne is pretty active and I think she'll be crawling and walking in no time.  I have zero idea what the timetable for these kind of things is.  Someday, I'm sure I will learn, but for now I will relish in the irresponsibility of being a foreign uncle.  Will this girl grow up and only be able to communicate with me in the little Chinese I know?  I'm sure she'll get some English in her household, but maybe I can use her as an impetus to learn Chinese.  It's a race against time.

No doubt she'll have a better accent than me...

Taipei International Flora Expo

So Haneda can be a little bit of pain to get to from Shinjuku.  Riding the Yamanote with a crap load of luggage is not the ideal situation.  The Keisei line from Shinagawa can also be bad if you take the local train, but this time we got an express which was infinitely better.  The airport itself is very nice.  It's obviously quite new, and we had no problems getting checked in.  Duty-free and shop selection is not as extensive as Narita's, but Japanese duty-free is not that great anyway.

Taipei Songshan Airport is much older in comparison.  V described it as sort of rundown, but it's not at all.  Just a bit aged.  It's super convenient to get to and from, and since taxis are cheap we totally just grabbed one with all of our luggage.

Both of us were wiped out, but we made it out to dinner with some of the family.  Everyone spent a decent amount of time figuring out what to eat.  I think that since it's the holiday season, restaurants get super booked all the time.  V and her parents finally decided on Chinese food (figures), and then we met up with V's sister and brother in law.  The place we went was totally empty when we walked in, and I was a little bit worried about how good it might be.  By the end of the night though, the place was packed.

I have marginal knowledge on the differences in Chinese food, but I have no idea what we ate.  We actually went to this place for the stinky tofu.  Previously, I've had it fried with pickled cabbage on top.  Said preparation is quite good even though it smells.  The one below is steamed I think and tastes considerably smellier.  A little bit too much for me to handle.

The restaurant has a real name, but everyone just called it "Big Beard."  This is of course because the guy who runs the joint has this crazy big beard.  The real name?  It's more interesting if I just leave it at "Big Beard" I think.  I tried to take a candid picture of him, but he was too fast.  Everyone's favorite dish of the day was the goat stew.

Looks kind of like beef stew; doesn't taste like it at all.  The white things that look like potatoes are actually water chestnuts.  Really good.  My favorite dish of the night was the fried eggplant dish I specifically ordered.  I love fried eggplants.  Stuffed and wanting to die, we stopped by a street cart on the way back to get 豆花 - douhua.  Douhua is basically tofu pudding, and this specific preparation of it is hot and syrupy with peanuts.

Yeah, I ate one too...  We pretty much passed out from exhaustion and food coma when we got back.  When we finally woke up it was something like 2 PM.  I'm not sure why I forgot how cold Taiwan can be in the winter.  Even if it's relatively warm outside (50 F or so), the house is always cold.  There is no heating and we solely rely on a space heater.  Want to know what the worst thing about a cold house is?  Sitting on the frozen toilet.  How I dread going to the bathroom...

First order of business: cut my hair.  Before:

After:

I lost so much hair.  I thought my head would feel lighter, but it just felt colder instead.  We met up with Irene at the salon and V got the signature hair wash and blow-out with her cousin.  Hair gone and time running out, we decided to go shopping for a bit.  Nothing exciting happened there, but we stopped by Starbucks to fuel and tried this new "Christmas Bread Roll."

Chocolate with walnuts and raisins inside...yep, tastes like Christmas.  V asked if I wanted to stop by Flavorfield, but I didn't think I really needed to.  We did anyway and lo and behold, Flavorfield had evolved a bit.  These new breads are the Chocolate Brioche and Chocolate Castle.  Didn't love either of them, though.  Let the carbfest begin!

Our second full day was beautiful out.  We didn't need our coats at all, and I felt warm just wearing long sleeves.  Perfect conditions to check out the Taipei International Flora Expo.  This giant outdoor flower exhibit lasts from November to April and takes up an enormous amount of space in the city.  It's even separated into three different sections that are so large, I would just call them campuses.  Some of the indoor exhibits are ticketed, and we arrived too late to really have a chance at tickets.  Instead we decided to focus on most of the outdoor displays and come back another day to get tickets early.

Anyone who knows my wife knows how much she loves flowers.  This place was perfect for her.  Too bad there were a billion other people there to share her joy.  School children on field trips everywhere and old people in tour groups were blockading all paths. 

We waded through the rolling hills of poinsettias as we tried to figure out what was open and available.  I can't begin to imagine how much money they spent putting this thing together.  They built a bunch of buildings to house exhibits and maintaining all the outdoor fields must take a ridiculous amount of resources.

For how much effort the city put into all the tiny details, I can't imagine this is a one year thing.  The flowers outside even get rotated as seasons change supposedly.  The last part of the first campus had individual exhibits for forty or so countries and this is probably where we spent the most amount of time.

The first one we went into was Canada.  Apparently houses in Canada have living rooms full of orchids and even have extra side rooms for neon-purple narcotics production.

Stopped by Thailand which didn't have many flowers on display.  Actually Korea didn't have many flowers on display either.  Instead they grow pumpkins on the roof and hang persimmons from the ceiling.

Both of those things are true by the way, it's just almost stereotypical.  That's really how most of the exhibits were, though.  America looked more like the Southwest than anything I'm used to with cactus galore.  The Japan exhibit was fairly large and included a zen garden and a lady who can't read Chinese or English.

Bhutan was kind of cool with a buddha statue and these turning wheel things.  I don't think I know any Bhutanese people, but V says you turn the wheels to spin away your bad luck.  We spun away a whole lot of bad luck.

Of course the token Taiwan exhibit had to be grand.  They constructed this huge bamboo dome amidst a bamboo thicket.  V gazed through the top of the dome as she pondered something, something obscure and reflective I'm sure.

The other side of the dome exits you into a zen-like pond.  Peaceful but a little less peaceful than desired with a billion people around you.  The over-under on the number of pictures I walked through that day is probably like 34.  I'm gracing another hundred or so with my presence in the background.

We skipped past a lot of the different countries and finally headed to the second campus.  Notably, Hong Kong had an exhibit while China did not.  But of course.  A tunnel connects you to the second area and part of the space right outside the tunnel use to be a part of a children's amusement park.  V got all nostalgic about the amusement park and this tree.

Apparently this tree used to be part of the old attractions and was somehow preserved when they converted everything to the flora expo.  Near the crazy old tree, you finally meet the mascots of the expo:

With children hanging all over them, V couldn't get a chance to sneak in and snap a shot with Pinky.  Luckily she's an all-star and stands all by herself in a different section.

It's a good thing the freaky London Olympics mascots will be this cute and not creepy cyclops.  I was really hoping we would see people walking around in flower mascot suits, but alas, no live action.  So the second campus is mostly a bunch of pavilions with awesome names like the Pavilion of Regimen and the Pavilion of Angel Life.  Most of these require tickets as well, but we made our rounds trying to find one we could make it into. 

We headed to this crazy wooden structure to see what it was all about.  Turned out it's just an entrance to the expo...  They seriously have to have spent a crapload of money making this place.  Moving on is this giant deformed whale.  It's back must be totally bent out of shape for the tail to come out at that angle.

Just kidding, there's another whale behind it.  Clever photography, I know.  The second campus in general is more landscaped than the first.  The first area has these huge outdoor exhibits, but the second feels more like a park.  V took a break to look out at the glory of Taiwan.

Past these paths are the Pavilion of Dreams, the Pavilion of Future, and the Pavilion of Angel Life.  The Pavilion of Future had the shortest line we had seen all day, so we waited for less than half an hour to get inside.  This is where we found another glory of Taiwan.

How forced was that joke?  I pat myself on the back for that one.  Never knew there was a plant called Taiwania.  I'm not even sure which one it was.  I think that the Pavilion of Future was supposed to explain how the world is going to be green in the future and how plant life is part of that.  By the way, we call it "green" in the US.  In Japan they always say "eco" this, "eco" that.  Not sure what they call it in Taiwan yet.

I did learn that I've never eaten a female papaya, only hermaphroditic ones.

Which leads me to wonder if I have ever eaten a female fruit at all.  The Pavilion of Future mostly had nothing to do with the future I think.  There were a bunch of rareish flowers and a room full of cactus.  The exhibit ended with a giant wall full of all sorts of different orchids.

This is just a small sampling.  V loved that last bunch of flowers.  Once you get out of the Pavilion of Future, there's a relatively short line for the Pavilion of Angel Life.  We could not figure out what the Pavilion of Angel Life was.  I got the feeling it was some spiritual place that promotes tranquility and whatnot.  We went inside and it turned out to be a short film. 

I did not feel tranquil at all after being tripped out by dancing cats.

By the time we got out it was getting dark.  We decided to call it a day and check the rest of it out some other time.  The Taipei International Flora Expo definitely requires more than one day.  I'm positive our second day isn't even going to be enough to cover what we missed.  Overall, the expo lacks some focus, but the city obviously went all out putting it together and it shows with all its splendor.

We met up with Ba and Mama for dinner at everyone's favorite Peking Duck place.  Like I said, everyone seems to be eating out these days, as the place was completely booked and we only got a table since we were eating at 6 PM. 

It was awesome.  This jellyfish salad type thing we ordered was really good, and I monopolized the snow pea tips.  I love snow pea tips.  We ordered like six dishes for four people and packed most of it to go.  Whenever I eat with V's parents, we invariably order ridiculous amounts of food.  Somehow most of that food gets eaten, but it's difficult not to eat when there's so many good things just sitting there in front of you.  Additionally, everyone's talking in Mandarin and the best way to feed my blank boredom sometimes is with food of course.  So yeah, I ate too much.

We got home and wanted to die from having overeaten...again.  Meanwhile, Popo did his best guard-dog impression.  He looks healthier and more youthful than in the summer.

Yay, Popo.  Coming up: another food adventure.

Merry Tokyo Christmas

Apparently I missed a giant Christmas bonanza back in Chicago.  There's not doubt about it, Christmas in Asia is more of a couple holiday than a month long season.  Single people spend their Christmas depressed about not having a significant other and really it just feels like another Valentine's Day.  Or Halloween with slutty santas and slutty elves.

December 23rd was a quiet day.  My last day of school and the last day in Japan for a lot of classmates.  I thought that we would do one last night out, but that didn't end up happening.  Instead V and I spent the day with stomachs recovering from the previous ramen madness and had Freshness Burger for dinner.  Well, I couldn't handle eating one fish burger for the entire day's meal and added a instant ramen.

It's the Ippudo X Mouku Tanmen Nakamoto from the Tokyo Ramen Show in instant form.  You can buy it at 7-11 and it was definitely one the best cup noodles I've ever had.  The 23rd was also that day that V's tiny plum tree (now named "Plum Plum") reached it's peak.  I guess the flowers only last a week or so since it reached full bloom in a couple of days and then by the 25th had already begun shedding petals.

If we could find a way to fertilize the flowers then we could get it to bear tiny plums.  Alas, I suppose no plums this year.  V's been looking for a way to bring Plum Plum through US Customs, but in reality we'll probably be flying through Taipai, so she'll need to bypass the customs of two countries.  Good luck to her.  That was sincere by the way.  It's difficult to detect sarcasm on the internet, but that wasn't sarcasm at all.  I like Plum Plum.  I bought it!

In the past week, I found that one of the analog channels on our TV carries NFL games starting at midnight.  They play the games all week long and although the games have obviously been played, I've been enjoying watching them anyway.  It's kind of nice since the games are cut so that there are no commercials or timeouts and the game flows seamlessly.

Unfortunately, every now and then the game stops for fifteen minutes or so while they do a BS News break.

BS stands for "Broadcasting Satellite" which is the major technology for TV broadcasting in Japan.  Still, poor naming choice.

Christmas Eve came and I admittedly dropped the ball.  I spent most of the morning trying to make reservations for a dinner and kept on getting calls for the reservations I made online being unavailable.  Finally, got a reservation in Shibuya at what seemed to be a Traditional Japanese - Western fusion place.

Finding nice restaurants in Tokyo is overwhelming since there are so many restaurants and the bulk of them are quite expensive.  In Chicago, I can pay $30-$40 an entree and try out places without worrying too much.  Well, we don't usually go anywhere we don't know is good anyway.  However, in Tokyo the cost for an unsatisfactory meal is disproportionately high.  So, I'm extremely adverse to eating anything I don't already know is good.  Finding out what is good is also pretty difficult.  Not only is it hard to get decent reviews, but I also don't necessarily trust the tastes of the Japanese.

Our favorite tapas place in Chicago plays Spanish TV (not even Mexican!) on the walls.  In Japan, I don't even necessarily know if I'll be able to find Spanish on the menu.  I've already written about my gripes of ordering French food off menus without any written French.

Japan is a lot like America in some ways.  Both are pretty insular societies.  Everything in Japan is made for the Japanese and everyone else is expected to conform.  As a result, a lot of foreigners either end up staying in a corner of Tokyo where they can get by on only English or are quite proficient at Japanese.  Speaking of which, my comfort level with Japanese has increased dramatically without me noticing.  Previously, I had to put in a substantial amount of effort in the everyday, but now I find that most things I do don't require me to think too hard about what I want to say.

Back on topic, we ended up canceling our reservation and holding out for a restaurant that's a can't miss.  If I had made my reservation weeks ago, I might have been able to something suitable; but it was a little shortsighted of me to try to make a reservation on the day of Christmas Valentine's Day.

We were even invited to Fuku for yakitori and passed it up since we already had dinner plans...  Well dinner plans trashed, we went for some Christmas ramen instead.  Nearly every day, I ask V what she wants for dinner.  Occasionally she says she wants ramen, but what that really means is she wants Ichiran.  Recently, that has changed to Ichiran and Ippudo.  Ramen at Ippudo is good and all, but thereal  dealmaker for us is their moyashi - beansprouts.  It is difficult to overestimate just how much we (especially V) love beansprouts.  Every time we go, we finish one entire pot of them and they're free!  They sell their moyashi sauce in bottles and the only thing we need to figure out is how many we're going to buy.

I wasn't the only guy for Christmas ramen as several couples were there.  Hey, as long as the lady is satisfied, I've been halfway successful, right?  Right? I did succeed in convincing them to allow me to combine my two Ippudo cards, so now I'm only 14 bowls short of the membership card.  Boys'll be proud.

Ok, so it wasn't the most romantic dinner, but I did succeed in buying a Christmas cake.  Earlier in the week, we had tried to reserve one.  I went to pick it up, and the guy didn't ask my name or anything.  Just went in the back and gave it to me. 

Christmas Cake is a must have apparently.  Before Ippudo, we sauntered through the food court of the Tobu department store and it was madness with dozens of people in line at the ten or so different pastry stores, waiting for their cakes.  The other big thing on Christmas is KFC; ridiculous lines at every KFC we saw.  Someone needs to explain the Christmas fried chicken to us.  Cuz, in the Us it's Christmas Chinese food ya know...  Our cake turned out to be V's favorite combination: white cake, pudding, and strawberries.  I like this Christmas Cake tradition by the way.

While in Ikebukuro Station, we stopped by this stand selling random Hello Kitty things.  They didn't have anything that V wanted, but they did have a lottery machine with a wind tunnel filled with paper cards folded into pyramids.  I paid the 500 Yen so that V could reach in and pluck one out.  Every one is a winner, but we got what I think was the third place prize, a lap blanket:

I haven't used it yet, but apparently you can't properly appreciate how pleasant a small blanket warming your lap can be until you've tried it.  So they say.

The rest of our Christmas was pretty quiet.  We actually spent most of Christmas Day packing to leave for Taipei.  It was a little naive of us to plan to leave on the 26th and "enjoy" Christmas in Tokyo.  We packed until god awful in the morning that night.  Given another day, we could have gone shopping or something. 

There was a pseudo-plan to meet up with everyone for a Christmas potluck.  Fortunately, everyone was lazy, so Diana took some initiative and switched us to dinner at Maruhachi.  Nothing wrong with Okinawan food for Christmas.

99% of the Japanese beer market is conquered by four companies: Kirin, Asahi, Sapporo, and Suntory.  Most of the remaining 1% belongs to Orion and that's only because it's locally popular in Okinawa.  So, along with the food I got myself an Okinawa beer.

Except, it's actually made by Asahi?  I need to revisit my Japan beer data.  Somebody fed me some poor information I think.  It actually is different from the other beers I've tried, which all taste pretty similar.  Diana thought it tasted kind of like American beer and that might have been correct.  She then followed up by saying she doesn't like American beer and likes Japanese beer better, to which I awkwardly said, "...Yeah?" 

To cap off dinner, V and I unveiled our second Christmas cake.  For some reason, this cake (also from 7-11) was AKB 48 themed, although it really had nothing to do with the girl group.  No pictures of them on the cake or anywhere.  Just "AKB 48" written on the box.  If I had bought the cake for the cute girls, I would have been pissed.  Just saying.  When we were looking for cakes in the convenience store, we found out that all the cakes were 20% off, but they were running an additional promotion where you could then rock-papers-scissors with the clerk and if you won, get 50% off. 

Funny that this was my first time playing jankenpon in Japan.  From what the girls were saying at dinner, different regions of Japan do this in different ways.  The guy at the convenience store went, "Gu, jankenpon," performing only one pump of the fist and then releasing on "jankenpon" which he said really quickly.  This was totally confusing, so we settled on counting to three and then releasing on three. 

The whole thing still doesn't make sense to me, but I did win 50% off this macaroon cake.

Macaroon cakes are delicious apparently.  We split the thing into eight pieces for six people and ended up with an extra slice.  The cake was seriously chocolaty and with nothing to wash it down except the little bit of Calpis V had left, we left a slice behind.

Hard to feel bad about leaving a little bit of a 50% free cake.  Dinner was over, and some of the girls were going to go Christmas clubbing (something we could have considered if we didn't have a noon flight the next day). 

Took a couple of pictures to commemorate the occasion (and populate the blog).

Miwa always rises to the occasion.

Here's the whole party.  Christmas in Japan?  Verdict: not overly exciting.  It seems more like an excuse to hang out and party.  Shibuya was filled with santas on motorcycles and other crazies.  Really felt more like Halloween than the Christmas I'm used to.  Then again, I haven't had Christmas in the US in three years...  Next year, for sure!

Before we left, we set up this thing:

The groceries have been selling mochi for a while.  I had no idea why I was supposed to do this, but I decided I should do as the Japanese do while I'm here.  Wiki tells me this is called a kagami mochi - mirror mochi.  The two discs of mochi symbolize either the coming and going years, the human heart, yin and yang, or the sun and the moon.  On top you place a daidai which is a bitter orange; "daidai" means "generations".  Sounds like one of those traditions that nobody really knows where it comes from anymore.  People just do it for good luck in the new year.  They'll forgive me if I just put a mikan on top instead of an actual daidai.  Wiki also tells me we should break it open on the second Saturday or Sunday of January for the kagami biraki - mirror opening.

It's a good thing I checked wiki about when to eat my mochi.  For those who can't tell, my kagami mochi is pretty out of scale, and it's somewhat laughable how much larger the mikan is than the mochi.  It's supposed to look more like this:

Merry Christmas everyone.  See you in Taipei.