long cruise to flatground

Lzyk and I went to an allyoucaneat hotpot. This is a place where you get a chemistry lab style hotplate under your table, adn a metal bucket to cook food in. You can choose five or six styles of soup broth, and then you get a plate and it's time to head to the buffet. This is a magical place where you can gather dozens and dozens of things to eat; at least six varieties of mushrooms, another half dozen varieties of green leafy vegetables, a baker's dozen kinds of vegetables like squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, oo-toe, etc. Then there are eight different meats, sliced for shabushabu, shrimp, eggs, fish, tofu of every color of the rainbow except the bad one, shellfish of several varieties, little whole octopi, and at least 20 other things that I didn't get a chance to even look at, much less put in my cooking bucket. All of this was $380 nt, or about $12 USD. Some might scoff that the quality suffers, but but those people are uninitiated. This is the best deal in asia, but it comes at a ghastly price. Noth the kind you pay with money though. The last time I ate there, I couldnt skate or do anything else for almost 24 hours afterwards, including eat, because of the pain of consuming so much food. Tonight I was a little wiser, but still overdid it to the point that I nearly backed out of skating.

Thanks to my friends for not giving up on me. They started teh session at linsen  park, and harrassed me until I agreed to meet at the three stair park by my house, "just to skate around." From there, we got a message form a long lost homey who was out of taipei for years and just came back. I didn't think of a stupid name for him yet, but I will. He deserves it. He invited us to a flatground spot in Daan, which means "egg" or something, so we cruised about 20 minutes to get there.

The session there was mostly unremarkable, just smooth flat with wiggling longboarders going around. A dude I apparently met before but didn't recognize without the beard was there, and we skated and chatted and had a bang up time. A bum with breath of an alcoholic dragon leached onto me at the end and we discussed why I love Taiwan and don't like living in America, as best I could manage. On the way home, I got a ********* on a sketchy fucking street rail, with rickety loose tiles all over and a terrifying marble pillar about a foot away on the egress. I am a mentally weak skater, so I'm proud that I eventually managed the trick, after no attempts on the first six roll ups. Street skating is hard.

RMJ and I parted ways with PJA at ubike spot and beered up on the way home, with sufficient park discussion to make me feel like I can handel the next day at work.