Not much to talk about this week, just a bunch of new photos.

Enjoy.

Tomorrow I’m headed to a farm in Miaoli, the Taiwanese ‘Capitol’ of strawberries. Winter is their season in Taiwan, after all. Until next week.

Yeah, it kind of sticks out a little at the mall.

 The concept is actually a good one, especially considering that the target audience is children. Well, I assume it’s children as it’s located on the children’s wear floor of the Mistigoshi A8 building. While adults tend to associate airplanes with taking off your shoes, cramped seating, tiny bathrooms, and the occasional TSA-administered prostate exam, children associate airplanes with flying.

And there is nothing cooler than flying.

Themeatically-speaking, the execution of the “airliner” concept is quite good. The seats are upolstered in a pattern similar to that of aircraft seats. The restaurant windows are the same ovals as airliner windows. Need to be waited on? Simply push the flight attendent call button over every table, which is nested in a “air/light” cluster similar to that over every seat on your average airplane.

 This being Taiwan, the upostery design and “flight attendant” uniforms are modeled after China Airlines, the national (however misnamed) carrier. 

 Yes, China Airlines doesn’t actually have any Airbus A380 aircraft in its fleet, but they do have some ordered. And yes, I am hoping that they are put into service covering the TPE-LAX leg.

Please?

Overall, I have to give the A380 Sky Restaurant theme concept and execution a solid ‘A’. Unfortunately, how cool a restaurant theme is isn’t important in the context of, well…a RESTAURANT. I can forgive Disneyland for having crappy food (and it does) because it is an amusemet park and as such it’s primary job is to amuse me. A restaurant’s primary job is to feed me. So, how did this place do?

My order was for pork with tomato sause and cheese and the plate brought to me looked very appetizing.

The meat portion was big (yes, I’m a little heavy on the carnivore side of the omnivore scale) and the few vegetables that were there were well-used from an artistic perspective. Then I took a bite and felt severly let down. It’s not that it tasted bad. It’s that there was absolutely no taste at all. It had the texture of meat but the flavor of a warm glass of water. At first I had thought that perhaps the kitchen had forgotten to season mine, but overheard my wife mutter the same thing: flavorless. She had ordered noodles with cream sauce and baby clams, something as different from my dish as you can get.

As an adult, I have to give the food a D+. However, children aren’t the biggest fans of seasoned food (how else do you explain the popularity of McNuggets?) and even though the portion is adult-sized, the palette isn’t. For kids, the food is probably good enough.

To summarize, eat there once for the kitch value and to say that you’ve been but I don’t expect that many will choose to return for a meal much less make it a regular place.

In the meantime, these are the photos I took at the park, outside of the event.

Coming up next weekend, a few street-side snaps of Chinese New Year stuff. Oh, and happy year of the Water Dragon.

Ask your kids.

As I have a child who is absoliutely obsessed with Beyblade tops, our attendence was a no-brainer. The event was held in the same place as the last and was set up in much th same way. You buy a tear sheet of tickets (at NT$500/sheet) and then use the tickets to participate in the different activities. It’s the Homecoming Fair in the High School gym system. In fact, many of the activities resembled high school club projects. That being said, the way they integrated the use of the different toys into the games was very creative.

If you lose, you get a small gift in a black bag (like a plastic center screw for your fighting top). If you win, you get to choose from a selection of Beyblade fighting top components like the blades, aluminum center screws,and various bases.

The people manning each booth were very energetic, encouraging, and helpful. This really helped my kids get into it. Even the one that doesn’t like fighting tops loved the experience and decided that his new favorite thing is Bakugan. He took home three.

Of course, it wouldn’t be complete without someplace set aside for your newly-hyped children to buy things.  They literally have every Beyblade, Bakugan, and Scan2Go model currently available here so if your children collect be prepared to spend. The prices are on par with Toys ‘R Us (which is nearby), but they’ll give you freebies like carrying cases and such.

Tomy will have this set up until January 31st on the 7th floor of Mitsigoshi Building A8 in the Hsinyi District of Taipei, near the Vieshow Cinema.

So once my wife executed her right to choose we all hopped in a taxi and headed to the Songshan Culture & Creative Park. Due to all the Taipei Dome construction, there was no way to enter the park from either main street (Songshan Culture park is located next to the old cigarette factory complex on Guang Fu South Road and Chungsiao East Road), we eventually found an entrance after a U-turn and turn into an alley.

The indoor exhibition is really cool. All the dinosaurs are animatronic and have well-crafted, detailed rubber skins. Each animatronic animal is set into it’s own environment complete with detailed geology and flora. I was really impressed by the lighting design which helped convey a very ‘primordial’ atmosphere. There was some sound elements too, but the din of the crowd rendered them unintelligible beyond the occasional roar.

As there was no attempt at internationalization of the exhibition, I’m assuming that they don’t anticipate many non-Taiwanese visitors. Or young K-3 aged visitors since all the exhibit labels were Traditional Chinese, Mandarin-only with no English or “bo-mo-po-fo”. My children being first-graders and unable to read more then a few dozen characters, I would have appreciated at least the dinosaur names being labelled phonetically in bopomofo alongside their name in Chinese characters as they do at the Taipei Zoo. My final criticism isn’t really a criticism but a warning to those with mobility issues, of which I am one. Much of the area surrounding the indoor exhibition and the pathway that winds through the park itself is made up of unevenly-spaced cobblestone of widely-varying heights.

But here’s the important question: What did my boys think?

They gave it “Two Roars Up”.

Here’s a quickly thrown-together video of Dinosaurs Dream Park. Forgive the poor editing and cheesy soundtrack. For HD, watch the video directly on YouTube.

The Dinosaurs Dream Park Exhibit is open 7 days a week from 9AM-6PM and will be in Taipei until March.