Taiwan Diary #31: Cute character restaurant Aranzi Bistro 阿朗基咖啡

Taipei has an abundance of cute themed cafés or restaurants. This one i actually discovered while scrolling through the #taipei tag on Instagram. 

Here's the address:

No. 468, Section 4, Ren'ai Rd, Xinyi District, Taipei City, Taiwan 110

The characters in this bistro were all based on Aranzi Aronzo, designed by Kinuyo Saito and Yoko Yomura and are cute as well as a bit weird and dorky. Definitely not the kind of overly pink and cutesy character that is usually incredibly popular in Taiwan (like Hello Kitty)

The restaurant also sells a lot of merchandise of the characters.

Something I found really interesting were those Aranzi magazines with lots of photographs in them.

The decorations are absolutely adorable as well.

Prices are quite expensive, just like in any other themed restaurant.

The character cakes are 550NTD each, and are also sold in small booths in food malls in other places too. Every character has a differently flavoured cake

I got the Matcha flavoured one, which was pretty good but more like a mousse than a cake.

The plate it was served on was adorable though, the cake fit perfectly on the space the characters head was printed on the plate.

I also got a Matcha Latte which was delicious.

And had the same character on it.

I also got the pizza that was disappointingly small, and not that good. But good Pizza is generally not easy to find in Taipei.

All in all i'd say this is an adorable restaurant, with mediocre food. Just go for the cute cake and coffee, leave out the savory dishes.

Love, Lydia

Taiwan Diary #30: 2Gether Cafe

Today I want to introduce a tiny, but quite adorable cafe in Taipei. 

It's called 2gether, as in "Happy Together".

This cafe is famous for its marshmallows, and has two branches. The one I visited was the 晴光店

The adress is Zhongshan District, Lane 183, Section 2, Zhongshan N Rd, 4號

And it's right in the middle between Zhongshan Elementary School station and Minquan West Road.

The interior is adorable, lots of Toast plushies everywhere~

That's actually because the cafe is famous for its variety of unique toasts, and that Toast plush is actually their mascot. They're sold there too, but at a slightly expensive price.

They also had a paper figure of a "German" house (obviously with toast), which was slightly random.

You can also take photos with the plushies with your own camera (for free) or you pay a small amount of NTD to get a Polaroid photo taken by one of the employees.

Space-wise, this cafe is tiny and doesn't have much seating. But they put a lot of effort into their decorations, which is always appreciated.

the menu, unfortunately, is exclusively in Chinese.

But don't worry, if you download a small dictionary app called Pleco before your trip you can still figure out what to order. Even I couldn't read everything, so digital dictionaries are real lifesavers.

The drinks they offer vary between normal cafe choices, and traditional taiwanese breakfast style such as simple soy milk.
I opted for a Matcha Latte.

Onto their famous toast~
I orderered a marshmallow Toast, and even the packaging was really cute and perfect for take-away orders as well.

And the toast was delicious too. Super soft marshmallows on top, with white and dark chocolate sauce and crunchy bread underneath.
Extremely sweet though, so be warned.

That's it for today~

hope you enjoyed this blog post and hopefully, some of you find it helpful when planning your trip to Taipei.

Have any of you been there before, or would you like to go?

Tell me in the comments below!

Love, Lydia

Taiwan Diary #29: Danshui

I'm back in Germany! But don't worry, i still have so many more blog posts about my adventures in Asia to write, this blog will definitely still be updated,

I probably wrote about Danshui before, but I got a few more photos to show you.

The easiest way to get to the main area of Danshui, and its famous old street is to simply take MRT line 2 (red line) all they way to it's final destination.

If you visit Danshui in summer, make sure to stay hydrated! One of my favourite drinks to get is 7-elevens grapefruit green tea! How i miss it..

Danshui certainly is one of the most beautiful plaes to visit that's reachable via MRT, so make sure to go.

If you avoid gong on the weekend, it's a pretty quiet and realaxing place too.

No matter how pretty the water looks though, no swimming allowed!

You can take a nice bike tour around the area though. U-bikes are everywhere.

Except for its scenery, Danshui is also famous for it's big amount of delicious food that you can get there.

One of the most famous little restaurants there is almost at the very end of the street that passes along the sea. It's directly across the turkish ice-cream vendor. Just look out for those orange bowls.
They have a big selection of small dishes, only around 30 NTD each.

Of course there's much more food than just that!

Fried Squid is a popular treat here. You can get it cut up or as a whole, giant squid.

I'm not too fond of squid normally , but it does taste pretty good here,

Soft-serve ice-cream is especially popular in summer, and they have super big versions too! But beware, it will melt really quickly so either get it when it's not burning hot, or eat very, very fast.

There's also lotss of small souvenir shops that you can check out.

We also found a German bakery...with a very questionable logo.

The Reichsadler seems to be strangely popular here. Just the other day we found an entire clothing store in a mall that had huge flags of it, and clothes with it, and clothes with the SS logo and other motives of the sort. It was creeping me out, Taiwan really needs to improve their history lessons a bit because it doesn't seem to have come across yet that those are not "fun, cool" motives that you should put on clothing or a logo.

All in all, Danshui is a pretty interesting place.

And awesome for taking photos as well.

Did you visit Danshui or would you like to? Please tell me in the comments below!

Love, Lydia