Another American Adventure: Taipei

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Taipei

It's been snowing off and on all day (mostly on). John and I are a little disoriented, being away from home and family on Christmas. This is the first time in 26 years we've had Christmas without Eric. We decided to be like the Jews, and go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.

Taipei was a good choice. Somewhere east of Pittsburgh (Fox Chapel) on the Monongahela River, it is one of the best Chinese restaurants around - probably the best Chinese we've had. We had shrimp dumplings, seafood in a birds nest and shrimp and pork in black bean sauce. Everything was wonderful.

This is what the fortune in my cookie says:

Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed.

My lucky numbers are 50, 49, 28, 11, 43, 40.

1 comment:

BarbaraDecember 25, 2010 at 8:00 PM
Sounds like a delicious Christmas dinner! Happy Christmas, Beth!
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.