Yesterday I went to Mamoun’s. Today I went back for lunch. Ah… fantastic, cheap, good ol’ times.
Last night I went with my friend Jerry (getting English PhD at Yale) to Bar. Got a pitcher of the AmBar, then a medium red + mozzarella pizza with half mashed potatoes and half basil + green peppers. I never had the mashed potato topping when I was at Yale basically because I wasn’t a big fan of tubers. But that changed gradually (and totally — after the last girl I was with).
Now it just makes sense — dough + cheese + tomato sauce + potato, baked in a rocket hot oven. Delicious. The beer was a bit disappointing — I thought it was a bit unbalanced, leaning on the sweet side, though it had faint taste of port. Who cares though — I’m still a fan of Bar.
It was great to see Jerry again — we always had a great time hanging out when I went to school here. After 3 years, I’m finding that we have even more in common and have some pretty cool conversations.
We spent the night watching a Taiwanese film “Ocean Point No. 7″ (my translation). I’m not sure how a Taiwan-Taiwanese person would have reacted to it, but I thought it was hilarious. The characters were caricatures of Taiwanese people. One of the most beautiful things of the movie was having a Japanese character/story on top of the Mandarin and Taiwanese stories. It’s a unique aspect of Taiwanese culture.
It could have been a great movie, except the last parts of it …. which suuuuucked. Total let down. But then again, I hate that cheesey, nostalgic, self-loathing, wallowing-in-melancholy Taiwanese pop. (I hear some of the Taiwanese love Taiwan even more after watching this movie — understandable.) Don’t worry — if you think I ruined the ending for you, I didn’t. Most people could have seen it coming from a mile away.
