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.