Posts tagged “taipei”

Food Preparation Customs

img_1749.jpg
Taipei 101

img_1778.jpg
Fresh juice

At the market in the basement of Taipei 101, I ordered a fresh juice from a juice stand. The young man who was making the juice rapidly measured and assembled the ingredients in a blender. As he was blending the fruit, he began to pour in honey. After a moment, he grabbed a long spoon, stuck it in what was becoming my drink, tasted and took a taste. Then with one hand he threw the spoon in the sink and with the other he added more honey.

Fruit, of course, is inconsistent. If you want to prepare food to a certain sweetness (or other taste attribute), and the ingredients aren’t exactly the same, how else can you do it without tasting?

In the west, at least, fast food is typically based on sourcing consistent ingredients and building a trainable process so the staff don’t have to use subjective judgments like taste in order to prepare a good product. As well, we don’t expect that people preparing our food would be eating it. In this case, the spoon was clean and was disposed of right away, so there was no chance of contamination, but the whole concept that this person consumed something and then gave me the rest was just so unfamiliar.

Yet another standard that I hadn’t even questioned until I saw it play out differently in Taipei.

Hey, bloggers!

heybloggers.jpg
Sign from Intellectual Property Office, Ministry of Economic Affairs, in the Taipei airport
The sign reads:
Post only authorized images, music, videos, or writings on your blog, or you could be blogging your way into court! Today’s user is tomorrow’s right owner. Respect others’ intellectual properly rights.

Even before clearing immigration in Taipei, there’s an intellectual property warning for bloggers. Is this really such a big problem? I’d expect them to worry more about CD and DVD piracy first.

Die Hard 4.0: Die Hard Goes Global

diehard.jpg
Die Hard 4.0 poster, Taipei

It’s not news that movies are released with different titles in other markets. Still, it was curious to see a familiar product under a slightly different brand. Live Free or Die is an American slogan, and so outside North America, perhaps Live Free or Die Hard doesn’t work as well as a title (perhaps the American-ness is not as appealing, or there is less recognition of the reference).

IMDB lists the different titles (and working titles) around the world.

Die Hard 4.0    Australia / Denmark / Finland / Japan / Netherlands / Sweden / UK / USA (working title)
Duro de matar 4.0    Argentina / Mexico / Peru / Venezuela
Die Hard 4    USA (working title)
Die Hard 4: Die Hardest    USA (working title)
Die Hard: Reset    USA (working title)
Die Hard: Tears of the Sun    USA (working title)
Die hard – Vivere o morire    Italy
Die hard 4 – Legdr?°g?°bb az életed    Hungary
Die hard 4 – Retour en enfer    France
Duro de Matar 4.0    Brazil
Jungla 4.0, La    Spain
Poly skliros gia na pethanei 4.0     Greece
Smrtonosná pasca 4.0    Slovakia
Stirb langsam 4.0    Germany
Szklana pulapka 4.0    Poland
Umri muski 4.0     Serbia
Vis libre ou crève    Canada (French title)
Visa hing 4    Estonia
Zor ölüm 4.0    Turkey (Turkish title)

Trend Ecosystem

It’s fascinating how most successful products lead to an ecosystem of supporting products. The Crocs fad has provided the fan-base to support charms, little decorations that attach to the holes on the shoe’s surface and let the wearer further establish their individual identity within the trend of people who have established a unique identity by wearing Crocs in the first place.

Acknowledging that following a trend has a very different meaning in Japan, we bring you the Crocs family, who we saw on a bus in Kyoto, each with their own charms.

dsc_0117.jpg
Dad

dsc_0116.jpg
Mom

dsc_0120.jpg
Son

dsc_0118.jpg
Baby

In addition to aftermarket personalization, many trends also generate a safety backlash meme (iPod muggings, anyone?). In Taipei, it’s dangerous to wear Crocs on escalators.
img_1855.jpg

Manufacturers like Apple are very savvy about creating/controlling their aftermarket, but I wonder about the backlashes. Are PR people planting those stories or doing damage control or not realizing their significance?

Update: Karl Long on the Crocs backlash (safety and others) here

Foreign foods in foreign lands

07-0903-1.jpg
Although we were dazzled by the array of Asian cuisines available in the food halls at Taipei 101 we observed the biggest (and most eager) crowd at the KFC. We were further surprised to note the Air Canada promotion (amusingly inaccurate translation here including surprising use of the word urine) where, to honor the culture and flavors of Canada, they’re selling a traditional Chinese egg tart drizzled with maple syrup. We passed, thanks (we had hoped it was a traditional Canadian butter tart, but no luck).

img_1779.jpg
The outside of the KFC stand was decorated with retro Americana and historical brand imagery.

img_1782.jpg
The American Road Trip promotion at TGI Friday’s
Around the corner was TGI Friday’s, with an American-themed promotion, throwing together states, highways, and foods that might believably (in Taiwan, I guess) carry a geographic association: Kansas Cinnadunker Donuts, Illinois Mushroom Steak, California Shrimp Martini, Missouri Chicken Parmesan, Texas Dragonfire Chicken, Arizona Cape Cod Shrimp Louie, and New Mexico Tortilla Tilapia.

Check out the press release for this promotion.

Movie lovers must have seen car chase scenes on American inter-state highways, the most notable of which is the No 66 Highway. The new menu features characteristic foods of the eight states through which the No 66 inter-state highway runs. That would include Texas, New Mexico, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and California.

img_1787.jpg
Start spreading the news
Although not a food venue specifically, it’s worth pointing out the New York, New York shopping mall, noted for the presence of American brands.

It’s a curious part of the experience of being a foreigner — in addition to noting the things that seem strange (and some of those will be appearing here eventually), in our global world we are likely to encounter things that we expect to be familiar, yet through someone else’s lenses they are very very different.

Series

About Steve