Finally, Stinky Tofu!

We've been on a family road trip since early Monday morning, ten people in two cars driving down through Taiwan's mountainous middle to see family, friends, and natural beauties. Our first stop was Taichung (pronounced "Taizong" for some reason), where we hung out with Roger's cousin, who we call the "sandwich cousin" because his name sounds (to my American ears, at least) remarkably similar to the Chinese word for sandwich. This cousin took us to the night market in Taichung, and upon learning that I hadn't yet tried stinky tofu or 1,000 year egg, he procured both for us. The egg is... interesting, the white turned brown and the yolk a rather disconcerting shade of bluish-green. Apparently it's a duck egg that has been allowed to go a bit bad, in the manner of our blue cheese. It's usually eaten with something else, and we had it with silky tofu. The taste was fine, but not something I'd seek out. The stinky tofu was, well, quite stinky. It really does smell almost exactly like excrement, but once you get past that, the tofu itself is quite tasty, if you like tangy foods. It sounds like the tofu has also been allowed to ferment until it's a little off, and once again, I definitely wouldn't seek it out, but am glad to have tasted it. Other less bizarre treats from that evening included a tea-soaked hardboiled egg and some really exquisite bubble tea.

After Taichung, we headed to the beautiful Sun Moon Lake, then up into the mountains, and last night we stayed in a little town perched on a mountainside that boasted a hotspring spa right in the hotel! It was designed like an underground grotto, despite being on the 5th floor of the hotel. (Random fact: buildings here don't have a fourth floor, as the word for four is a homonym with the word for death. Kind of like our superstition about the number 13, I guess) The mountains are incredible, very steep and covered with pine and bamboo forests, with little villages nestled here and there, their vegetable gardens and fruit orchards mostly hibernating at this time of year. We did some hiking today, saw Yu Shan (Jade Mountain), the tallest mountain in Taiwan, and then watched the sun set spectacularly over varied peaks. Tomorrow it's off to see more sights, which I will write about the next time I have internet.

More pics are up at flickr.com/photos/goateebird and they're pretty sweet, I'd advise checking them out!

Merry Christmas?

So it's Christmas, apparently. Today we "celebrated" by going to some coastal towns to see an old mining village, then driving to a wonderful restaurant in the middle of seeminly endless rice paddies. At the village we saw the "Golden Waterfall," a yellowish, smelly, but beautiful little cascade tinted by deposits from previous gold mining. At a little museum, we learned about how awesome gold is (did you know that a single gram of gold can be beaten into a square kilometer of gold leaf? Craziness!), and got to touch a massive gold brick worth several millions of dollars. The restaurant was really exceptional; there was no menu, and we almost arrived too late to get in on the food for the day, but thankfully they let us have our meal there, because it was absolutely exquisite. We had a selection of sashimi that arrived on a little boat (!), various vegetables and meats, crab coated in dried garlic, shrimp in fried rice noodles, hot pot with milk broth, a whole steamed fish, milk pudding and fruit for dessert. It was a Christmas dinner to die for!

Yesterday we attended the engagement ceremony for one of Roger's cousins. It was at the Palais Chine, one of the fanciest hotels in Taipei, and apparently the mother of the bride booked it both because of this fact and because there is a life-sized horse statue in the lobby, and the groom's zodiac sign is a horse. Yes, really. And it only gets better. We arrived at about 10am, just as the engagement ceremony was actually ending, because we were not allowed to be there. The reason? Roger and I are both tigers in the zodiac, and tigers are not allowed to be at ceremonies like that because they bring bad luck (destructive energy or something). Roger's mother was also not allowed to be there, because her relationship to the bride is aunt, or "gu gu", which sounds too much like the word for alone. Seriously. Apparently at the ceremony the groom-to-be puts the ring on the bride, and she crooks her finger so the ring doesn't go on all the way, because she doesn't want him to control her completely. The elders also give red envelopes, and I saw the bride's sister, who was taking care of the envelopes, holding at least a half-dozen, with more in her bag. Pretty crazy. When we arrived, it was photo op time, so we posed for several pictures with the bride, groom, and some permutation of relatives. We then ate lunch, which was a decadent twelve-course affair featuring things like shark fin soup and suckling pig with duck. When we were three courses from the end, the groom and his entire family suddenly got up and left, without saying good-bye. Roger and I were pretty stunned, and were informed that this was both traditional and respectful. They left right before the fish course, because the word for fish (yu) is a homonym with the word for spare change, so they were essentially saying "We leave you some spare change", ie not taking advantage of the generosity of the bride's family, who had paid for the meal. They didn't come back either, so half the table was left to eat the dessert. It was a very interesting and edifying meal, that's for sure!

And new items for the strange foods list: raw snail, raw oyster, rice with pork blood, pork ears, pork liver.

We're leaving early tomorrow morning to travel around Taiwan, to go sight-seeing and visit Roger's mother's parents and some other relatives. I'm not sure what the internet availability will be, so I guess it's so long for now!

The great fruit list, etc.

Taiwan is apparently famous for its fruit. This is easy to believe, given the variety and quality of the fruit I've tried so far. The list (as much as I can remember, at least): miniature bananas, oranges that are greenish outside, apples, papaya, starfruit, persimmon, guava, pineapple, mango, dragon-fruit, melon, durian (a spiky, stinky fruit; we had it deep-fried), a crunchy pear-shaped fruit, this knobby green fruit with very soft flesh that tastes almost exactly like children's Dimetapp, and an apple-like fruit with a pit (my favorite so far, very refreshing!). There are fruit stands pretty much everywhere and random papaya and banana trees growing in various corners. I'll definitely miss all this fruit in Texas, where pretty much the only stuff you can get locally is peaches, oranges, grapefruits, and melons.

There are several American stores here that seem to be all the rage, namely 7/11 and Starbucks. There's pretty much a 7/11 on every corner, and there you can buy everything from thousand-year eggs to theater tickets. There are various competitors, notably FamilyMart, which seem to be about the same. There are also various Starbucks competitors, who will have a round logo with a woman in it, or something along those lines, and a slogan in Chinese that says something like "the preferred coffee of Seattle". Pretty amazing.

There are several things that I was not expecting to be able to find here, and I've been extremely surprised to find most of them in abundance. For example, milk. I thought that milk was not part of Chinese culture, but there are huge quantities of milk available for sale in every store, and I'm offered hot milk for breakfast every morning. Other examples: bread, chocolate, cheese (we were in a grocery store yesterday that had a cheese selection pretty much comparable to Trader Joe's), and coffee. The things that I miss are definitely not what I expected: having water, or even any beverage, at a meal, having a traditonal American breakfast (the typical breakfast seems to be fruit, bread and pastries), breakfast tacos... The food is so good though that I don't think about what I'm missing most of the time, because there's some tasty tofu permutation to try. Which brings me to...

Strange foods tried, cont'd: gelatinous tea (basically tea jello), gelatinous duck blood (duck blood jello! doesn't really taste like anything), chicken feet (surprisingly tasty), these black mustache-shaped root vegetables that you eat like roasted chestnuts (tastes sort of like a cross between taro and a potato, with a hint of fish thrown in). No news yet on the stinky tofu front, I'll do a full report when I get around to it.

Cabbage and Red Envelopes

Today we visited the National Palace Museum, which houses pretty much all of the historical artifacts not only from Taiwan but also from all of mainland China. Basically, when things started getting scary for the royalty over in China, they began shipping their precious goods to safe places out of the cities, and it turned out that the safest place to protect all this stuff from wars and communism and everything else was Taiwan. The collection is really stunning, including everything from pre-historic jade discs and carvings to some of the most beautiful and intricate pieces of art I've ever seen, from the 18th century-ish. Some of them were truly mind-blowing, including a fan made of woven ivory (yes, woven ivory!), an ivory carving consisting of about five intricately carved concentric spheres inside of each other, and Roger's and my favorite, a jade cabbage! This cabbage is apparently extremely famous in China, kind of like the Mona Lisa, except that it's a cabbage. There were many cabbage-themed items in the gift shop, including pens, magnets, pendants, a stuffed animal, and some extremely expensive replicas. This needless to say cracked us up a lot, though I'm sure we should have been more respectful to the cabbage, it being a national treasure. It even has its own wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Cabbage.

Aside from the cabbage, there is one other notable tradition I think y'all should know about. It seems that it is traditional in Chinese families for the elder members of the family to give red envelopes to the younger members, in which envelopes are large sums of money. However, the parents of the youngsters don't feel comfortable receiving that much money from generous relatives, so whenever one appears, an epic battle ensues, complete with shouting, shoving, forcing said envelope into unwilling hands or pockets, repeated entreaties on one side and refusals on the other, until the receiving party finally gives in and accepts the envelope. It doesn't end there though; the receiving family will usually keep only a small portion of the money and regift the rest to the children of the relative who gave them the envelope in the first place. Brilliant! These battles about money seem to extend to other areas too, including arguing over who pays for meals, ordering way more food than the party can eat (at dinner tonight we had about fifteen dishes for eleven people!), giving extravagant gifts, etc. It's been very interesting to observe, and I'll update with clarifications/more observations as they come my way.

Taipei, Taiwan: Further Impressions

Day four, and we've seen lots more of Taipei. I guess I'll go day by day. (Yay accidental rhyming!)

On day two, Roger and his parents and I went to the Taipei flower expo, built for a temporary flower expo (duh, I guess), but kept up and running for tourism purposes. The highlight of that expedition was a crazy interactive high-tech exhibition where we saw the highest-quality 3-D screens I've ever seen (no glasses necessary), and experienced/were subjected to a 360 degree panoramic movie-type thing. There were lots of uber-cute creatures and messages about harmony and unity throughout, as well as bracelets that interacted with the exhibits and a semi-customized "journey" involving one of five qualities (health, family, emotion, career, and one other I can't remember). Definitely a cultural experience.

The day after that, we went to a city on the coast and took a ferry between two towns that were pretty much identical, both consisting of rows of the kind of entertainment and food you can find at coastal townlets pretty much anywhere, except with a distinctly Taiwanese flavor, of course. Culinary highlights there included fried milk on a stick (mixed with flour and battered) and some extremely tasty barbecued corn, also on a stick. I also got my first whiff of stinky tofu, which is (surprise surprise) extremely foul to the smell, though I'm told it's very tasty. I'll give a further report once we've tried it. Roger and I also started keeping a foreigner tally, and our counter hit about 25 on that day, which gives you an idea of the approximate cultural make-up in these parts.

Today we drove to a town in the mountains not too far outside of Taipei to use the hot springs there. It's a wonderfully beautiful place, nestled in mist-shrouded mountains that are, as Roger put it, "subtropical as f***". We (Roger and I) used a hot spring that was essentially a bathtub that you could fill with water as hot or cold as you wanted. It was very peaceful, and we're still pretty much blissed out from it.

We've been eating just about every meal at various restaurants with some subset of Roger's family, mostly his father's side, but a couple meals with his mother's family. The meals are all family style, so everyone sits around a round table with a lazy Susan, a bunch of dishes are brought out and everyone helps themself. The standard utensils are a small bowl filled with rice, a small plate, a pair of chopsticks, and a tea cup. You use serving chopsticks, or your own, to pick up food and put it on the small plate, and from there you transfer the food onto the rice, or just eat it off the plate. If there's soup, you eat the solids with your chopsticks and then drink the broth right out of the bowl. Water is not served at meals; it's usually tea, or sometimes no liquid at all. Toothpicks and a napkin dispenser are also commonly on the table. It's a nice set-up, and I've been repeatedly grateful for my proficiency with chopsticks (thank you Mrs. Gannon in first grade!).

I decided before coming over here that I would try absolutely every kind of food I could, so here's the list so far of things I've tried: jellyfish, sea cucumber, bitter melon (so... bitter...), squid, pork intestine, abalone, some sort of tree fungus, shrimp and fish with heads on (didn't eat the heads, of course), and bamboo. And more on the way...

And last but not least, today's semi-random bullet-point list of cool/crazy stuff:

-The little green men in the crosswalk signs here actually walk! And when the timer is getting low, they run.
-Driving here is CRAZY!!! The standard distance between vehicles when passing seems to be about six inches, lanes are optional, scooters scoot around everywhere, and cars drive down streets barely big enough for six people to walk abreast. It's insane.
-Update on the musical garbage trucks: they do indeed play music so that people know to bring down their trash. It seems that some places don't have dumpsters or trash cans for people to put out, so they just have to listen for the truck and bring down the garbage. And it's not always Fur Elise, but I don't recognize the other songs.
-A huge number of people wear surgical-type masks on their faces when out in public, and at the restaurant we ate at tonight one of the waitresses had on this clear-plastic mouth-covering visor, ostensibly to protect herself and the patrons from germs.
-There is karaoke everywhere. And the English song list is pretty amazing. I.e.: we've seen songs with no lyrics (Bridal March, Take Five, Rhapsody in Blue), songs horribly mispelled (Heard it through the Goparine anyone?), and songs that no-one in the States actually knows (am I the only one who doesn't know the Tennesee Waltz/Tennes sea walts? Because Roger's uncle knew it pretty darn well).
-There are many dogs here, and a huge number of them are extremely tiny and cute and/or wearing some sort of clothing. We also saw a cat going for a walk... in a cat-suitcase.

More to come soon! And more pictures are up as well, at flickr.com/photos/goateebird.

Taipei, Taiwan: First Impressions

Roger and I arrived in Taiwan yesterday night, and this being the first international adventure of mine in awhile I thought that a (long-overdue) blog post is definitely in order. We're here for three weeks visiting Roger's family, and our first destination is Taipei. We're staying with Roger's uncle and his wife in a lovely apartment building, one of many in the city. There are no houses here, just tall apartment buildings, since space is at a premium. The complex we're staying at boasts many amenities, including (but definitely not limited to), ping pong tables, private karaoke rooms, a mah jong room with about eight tables, a swimming pool and hot tub, and a library. It's pretty sweet, and I definitely have plans to drag Roger into the hot tub before too long.

It's cold (well, at least by Texas standards: Yankees go ahead and laugh, but I'm cold at 50 degrees now!) and rainy here, which is apparently unusual for the winter. The mountains surrounding the city are mostly shrouded in fog, and everything is green! It's great to see some green after the Texan lack thereof, and there is enough ridiculously lush foliage to satisfy my urge for such things for quite awhile, I think.

We've been here for less than 24 hours, but there's already been enough cool/strange things to merit a bullet-point list, so here goes!

-The Greyhoundesque/tourist buses are likely to be bright pink/green/blue and/or brighly lit at night. In fact this aesthetic (bright colors, flashing lights) seems to be pretty much the norm.
-There are SO. MANY. SCOOTERS. And bikes. And cars, for that matter. But especially scooters.
-The garbage trucks all play Fur Elise, in the manner of ice cream trucks stateside. (A friendly reminder to bring out the garbage perhaps?)
-The work crews have extremely creepy human-headed hard hat-wearing mechanical flag-waving dummies posted to alert drivers.
-There is Christmas here. Or at least the decorations and music. And I thought I would be escaping that this year...
-The keyboard on which I'm typing is a dual English/Chinese keyboard. I would type a bit of Chinese to demonstrate, but it seems you actually have to know what you're doing for it to work (lame!).
-It seems that Rosetta Stone actually gave me the tools to understand enough so that I sort of know what's going on in a conversation about half the time (which is very impressive, mind you). Yay Rosetta Stone!
-We've been eating fresh guava pretty much non-stop since arriving, and other culinary delights have included ginger candy and dried peppers from China, homemade beef noodle soup, and hot fruit tea (think sangria tea, it's fabulous!).

For pictures/proof that those creepy construction worker dummies actually exist, check out Roger's flickr page. More to come soon!