A small restaurant in Taipei is selling some beef noodles at NT$10,000 (~USD330) per bowl.
The NT$10,000 beef noodle (Image via
Xinhuanet)
The restaurant is named “688 Beef Bowl”, and is located at Taipei’s busy Zhongxiao Road. The restaurant has been operating for 18 years and most of their beef noodles are priced around NT$150-300… the expensive noodles are only sold on limited basis and need to be pre-ordered.
I am not sure why the beef noodle cost so much; it seems like it’s not using special ingredients… the high cost was probably attributed by the quality of the beef. The restaurant owner has spent 5 years to search for the high quality beef to make this beef noodle… and a nice piece of beef could be really costly, obviously.
A man in Lanzhou, China, has planted some football shaped calabashes to pay his tribute to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
Football shaped calabash (Image courtesy of Lanzhou Daily) vs a normal calabash
Known as Mr Cha, the Lanzhou citizen wants to present the special shaped calabashes to the organising committee of the Beijing Olympic as a show of appreciation.
Cha took six years of experiments to find a method to grow these calabashes, and has obtained six national patents for his research.
The method of growing these calabashes is simple though… by putting young calabashes into moulds. The difficult part is the extra care needed to prevent the fruits from dying off while inside the mould.
Toilet themed restaurants are not something new in Taiwan; it has been around since 2004 (or earlier) with people dining in a toilet like environment and eating from a mini toilet bowl.
I always thought that the business idea won’t last long; but with the recent exposure by foreign press and bloggers, it seems that these eateries are becoming a bizarre-food icon from Taiwan… something like eating fugu in Japan and live octopus in Korea.
Below are some pictures from Modern Toilet, a food chain that operates 12 toilet themed restaurants in Taiwan; these pics are from its outlet in Shilin, Taipei…
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A hundred year old wild ginseng was sold for 1.88 million yuan (~ USD250,000) in an auction in Guangzhou, China, on November 6.
Models showing the US$250,000 ginseng (Image courtesy of
Dayoo)
Ginseng is a precious herb widely used in Chinese and Korean medicine.
USD250k seems like an outrageous price for a piece of ginseng, but it’s not the most expensive wild ginseng ever sold… a 300-year-old ginseng was sold for USD400,000 back in August 2007.
Some Chinese chess pieces made of pressed Pu’er tea leaves are shown at a tea shop in Suzhou, eastern China’s Jiangsu province on Tuesday (Oct 23)…
Chinese ‘tea’ chess (Image courtesy of
Crienglish)
Pu’er (or Pu-erh) tea has been a popular drink in China for over thousand of years. Drinking Pu’er tea is purported to aid in digestion, reduce blood cholesterol and lipid levels. It is also widely believed in Chinese cultures that tea could counteract the unpleasant effects of heavy alcohol consumption.
A Chinese pear was sold for 66,000 yuan (~ USD8,800) in Beijing, China. The 1.505kg pear was crowned the ‘King of Pear’ in a Chinese pear and fruit festival in Beijing last weekend (September 8), and was auctioned off with the astonishing price.
The King of Pear (Image courtesy of
Xinhuanet)
A giant mooncake is baked in conjunction with a bakery food festival in Shenyang, China. The mooncake is weighed over 10 tonnes, has a surface of 52 square metres and is stuffed with 10 different stuffings.
Gigantic mooncake (Image courtesy of
Xinhuanet)
Mooncake is a Chinese pastry traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival (15th day of the 8th lunar month in Chinese calendar); a normal mooncake is around palm-size.
A conjoined watermelon was found at a village near Fuzhou, Jiangxi Province in China. A watermelon farmer that has been in business for a decade found the watermelon in his field on Monday (August 13).
The watermelon breeder and the unusual watermelon (Image courtesy of
Jxnews)
