Sakura of DOOM

Yesterday I dragged Rachel, canandagirl and knullabulla out to Din Tai Fung, despite the insane hour-long wait. Din Tai Fung is the famous Shanghainese dumpling place from Taiwan; it has katakana next to the store name specifically for the Japanese tourists. Despite the touristy association, it's still one of the best Shanghainese dumpling places that I've been to, and I've been dying to have some for quite a while.

We got Shanghainese pork soup dumplings, which are these little, thinly-wrapped dumplings with tender pork meat, so juicy that they actually produce broth inside of the dumpling (ergo, soup dumpling). You dip them in black vinegar, and the vinegar cuts through some of the velvety meatiness, and eat them very slowly, so as to not burn your tongue. I was very pleased to see that everyone liked them.

We also had vegetable and pork dumplings, which weren't quite as good as the ones in Taiwan (less veggies, more pork), but were still tasty; fish dumplings, which I had for the first time; chicken noodle soup Chinese style, in which the chicken is cooked to pieces so that it flavors the soup; dumplings filled with pork and sticky rice; sticky rice cakes with pork and cabbage; sesame buns, which Rachel and I gobbled up; red bean paste dumplings, which are absolutely delicious and in the incredibly thin skin; red bean paste filled sticky rice things (zhong ze); this red bean cake type thing and.... I think that's it.

Needless to say, we were absolutely stuffed.

After going to another Japanese bookstore (I got a random manga that seemed to feature people from Tang Dynasty China), we ended up vegetating and watching more Escaflowne. Actually, Rachel watched Esca while I apparently dozed off, thanks to the prone position, the heat, and the dark room.

I am amazed that I managed to sleep through all of Dilandau's insane cackling of "MOERO!! MOERO!!" (translation: "Burn! Burn!" though I personally think "Burninate! Burninate!" is much more accurate).

Then Rachel took me to Zankou's Chicken, which is indeed awesome. It looks like a fast-food place, but it has really, really good rotisserie Greek chicken. Unfortunately, we got there about half an hour before closing, which is why I think the breast of my chicken was just a little dry. But I still had tons of dark meat, spread on pitas with their garlic sauce, which is creamy and extremely garlicky and amazingly good, piled on the skin, and pigged out.

We then watched the first episode of Last Exile, which I have already decided that I adore. It is steampunk with airships. Also, just as I commented that it was just like Temerarire/His Majesty's Dragon, except with airships, someone in the anime went, "Oh no! The Temeraire has been hit!"

Awesome.

I've also been reading a metric ton of manga, which I shall soon blog on.

Alas, I forgot to bring my camera yet again!

But after I managed to wake up after dreaming that I was at the Baba ashram with dirty showers and that everyone there hated me (I think I looked at too many pictures of India yesterday), we headed out to Empress Pavilion for dim sum. Amazingly, there was a very short wait. I think most people this weekend are trying to eat barbeque or something. We were seated in a corner, so we didn't get all that many carts passing by. Even so, I still got shrimp and jiou tsai dumplings, BBQ pork buns, taro rolls things, Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce, and I finally got to try the black sesame rolls that Rachel keeps talking about! They're really good and gooey and sesame-y, though after Rachel said several people didn't like them, I started seeing a vague resemblance to slugs.

Not that that stopped me from eating all of them.

After that, we wandered around several anime stores for a bit, in which I bought some keychain figurines to give to people and Rachel got more Naruto figurines and a FMA one to round out her collection. Then we nearly died of heatstroke as we wandered about Chinatown, which prompted Rachel to buy a hat and me to buy a dinky little umbrella, so I could shielf myself from the sun and look like all the other old ladies wandering around.

Then, it was on to Kinokuniya! I spent entirely too much money on:
- Cecilia Seigle, Yoshiwara
- Ryoko Ikeda, The Rose of Versailles, vol. 1 (it was republished in 8 vols.)
- Nananan Kiriko, Strawberry Short Cakes (I have no idea where I heard of her, but the art is interesting)
- Fumiko Enchi, Masks (Mely keeps reccing her)
- Hisaya Nakajo, Sugar Princess vol. 1, which is apparently about an ice skater girl

Hopefully I'll be able to find used copies of Saiyuki in Japanese at Bookoff or something, because I desperately want to read the originals. I also made Rachel get vols. 5 and 6 of Saiyuki Reload because they are so good!

We ate kurobuta ramen at a ramen place whose name I can't remember. They only have one type of ramen, though, and for a good reason! It was absolutely delicious -- very flavorful and silky broth, probably cooked for days and days with pork bones, tender slices of pork that nearly fell apart in your mouth, eggs hard-boiled to the perfect doneness, while soaking up the flavor of the broth, and noodles that were just tender enough, but still chewy. So, so, so good.

We also got mochi from the traditional mochi place, which has apparently been open since 1903, and two of the ones we got were pink white-bean mochi! I pretended that Fuu made them.

We also passed quite a few bookstores with books on ninjutsu, largely written by Steve Hayes. Rachel bought one, titled Clan of Death: Ninja, with the further bits "The Incredible True Story! In the quiet of a whisper, come the deadly soldiers of the dark."

There was a lot of snorting and snorfling that went on as we went over our purchases of the day.

And now, I am going to raid even more of her manga shelves, having now finished the published bits of Naruto and Alice 19th.