Fusion Buffet of Insanity

1. Woke up around 10, sent some emails, and headed out into the non-air-conditioned parts of the world. Had a tasty breakfast of guava and sweet bread with Winnie! The guava was not the pink-fleshed stuff I'm familiar with, but more like an apple or hard pear, with a guava flavor.
2. Today the plan was to visit Taipei 101 and hit up a crazy buffet place. We lit out and hopped on the metro. The metro near our place was all hot-spring themed, because we're near a national park and there are hot springs in the area. In fact, you can smell the sulphur! First we got me a metro card and watched some goofy little kids on little bikes.
3. The metro / sky train wasn't super crowded at this hour of the morning, which was nice. We looked out the window and chatted. A dude across from us wore a button-up with a number on it. I asked if it was a work uniform of some kind, but Winnie said no, high school! Summer school must have been in session.
4. We transferred to another line, and soon we were very near Taipei 101, once the tallest building in the world! We took some goofy pictures (see the Image Gallery post!), and headed inside, through a maze of shopping malls. Neither Winnie or I were super excited by the acres of status-farming malls, but we enjoyed the skybridges between the buildings. We managed to find the Weeslide, a bizarre 3-story slide, and gave it a whirl. Then we proceeded to the buffet and hung out in line talking about Finite and Infinite Games :D which I'd given Winnie before she left.
5. OMG THIS BUFFET
6. It was pretty packed on a Tuesday afternoon at 2:30. The volume these guys were doing was incredible. We loaded up on fresh seafood of multifarious kinds--everything was so fresh and amazing! We went back for seconds and thirds of wildly different things. Everything was being cooked about as fast as it was being consumed. They had fresh squeezed juices, including this delicious guava juice that was thick as a slurry with seeds and was vividly dark purple.
7. The sheer diversity of the offerings was just wild. The cuisine was a union of improbable fusion types from all over the Cartesian product of Asian and European cuisines. I had a duck taro sushi roll, some chili pork belly, raw swordfish nigiri, a creamed corn soup topped with a flaky puff pastry...
8. After my third plate of all this stuff, we became fully cognizant that there was still an entire array of desserts waiting for us. We loaded up on multifarious cookies and cakes, bowls of ice cream and sherbet, cold brew carbonated tea dispensed from little growlers hooked up to brightly colored taps. We even got a bowl of shave ice milk tea, complete with little boba. I'm listening to "Don't Threaten Me With a Good Time", and I find the lyrics an appropriate description of this buffet. Of course, the place was a very high-class affair, with mirrored mazes of mahogany walls... I'm only talking about the decadence of the food ;)
9. We spent our full two hours allotted at the buffet, then stepped out once more into the blazing heat, a immersive experience that radiates from the concrete and asphalt, bakes down from the sky, shimmers in the air...
10. We walked along a long and busy road to the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial, a great pavilion honoring the leader of the revolution against the last emperor of the last Qing dynasty. Chinese and Taiwanese history in the last century is strikingly complex, with many revolutions. In fact, it is so complicated that even after looking at the exhibits and, just now, trolling Wikipedia, I can't give you a satisfying tl; dr. Sun was a crazy hardworking Alexander Hamilton-esque figure; not a few months after he became president of a new revolutionary organization, he handed over his post and went to form more revolutionary organizations to fight the warlords who were carving up the chaos. 
11. After paying homage to a great enthroned statue, we checked out some exhibits. Then we hung out on a bench outside--there was finally some shade and a nice breeze blowing. It was lovely out. We grabbed some ice-cold water at an outdoor vending machine.
12. Finally, we made a long and circuitous trip home. We walked around a little bit in central Taipei, then took the sky train back. We walked around more in the local region, checking out some convenience stores. In one such store (a 7-11) there was a printer and a machine where you could pay credit card bills and make all sorts of other convenience transactions (I think using the Taipei metro-card money system). Alongside the classic American hot dog rotisserie, there was a big bucket of stewed eggs, and another interesting food warmer where some buns? were toasting on hot rocks.
13. Ooh! Not done yet! After that we checked out a grocery. It had very expensive potatoes (apparently not grown here) and all sorts of wild snacks. We got "shrimp strips", quail eggs and plum candy. I haven't tried any of it yet, there has been so much food! I also got a Taiwanese beer, which I did try--it had a fascinating, somewhat hoppy but also not very bitter flavor. And "mildly sweet" Oreos for the Laurelhursters back home to try--they like weird flavored oreos for some reason.
14. We got back home and chilled. I was really tired; the jet lag still affected me. I crashed out almost immediately, after giving Mei Ai (Winnie's mom) Joan's box of See's candies :D