Fortune Travels: Journey to the East: Eating my way through Taiwan

I survived the 19 hour flight to Taiwan and was rewarded with some of my favorite motherland eats in the first day: steamed buns, Peking duck, and pot stickers. Sadly, scallion pancake man did not have his cart out. It has been very cold and rainy so I really don't blame him. Plus, he's rich--there's a lot of money in a scallion pancake cart, apparently--so he really doesn't need to be out there anyways.

I saw a bunch of relatives including my one surviving great aunt (87 and still kicking), baby cousin Winny and her parents. Winny's dad is a dermatologist with the most fantastic skin. He also notices every single pimple and blemish and gives you tiny cryptically labelled jars of ointments. This time he came at me with a flashlight at the dining room table and pointed out pimples I did not even know I had. Ah, family! Also at their house were Wally and Shawn, their two fluff ball dogs. Wally is the fat one but he was shaved, so it was harder to tell the two apart.

I also lost the fight against jet lag. Around 3pm I was ready to have a meltdown. Napped for 3.5 hours. Back to bed by midnight, and now up at 5am watching Chinese music videos on MTV. And blogging using Mom's spotty bootleg wi-fi.

Today we'll be heading into Taipei and the next day we are off to the Las Vegas of Asia, Macau, to win big!