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.