A trip to Danshui

This weekend our Asian history, culture, and politics professor invited all four of us American exchange students to visit his home in Danshui and spend the night. We did, and it was wonderful.

Danshui is a smaller city near Taipei, and it's a popular tourist destination because of the old European architecture, the docks by the sea, and the fact that you can get there by the MRT.

Most of the evening was spent talking, and our professor is an interesting guy to talk with -- he has a very international perspective from living in Taiwan, getting a degree in England, travelling in Europe and Central America, and doing various international relations jobs. It's fascinating to hear that kind of international perspective, because it's surprising.

We also learned the differences between numerous different kinds of tea, and tried warm sake. One thing I've definitely learned by coming here is that there really are major differences between teas -- even very similar teas.

We slept in a Japanese-style guest room. When I say "Japanese style", I don't just mean that the decor was modelled after that of Japan. I mean that the floor was a raised hard wood platform, and that's where you sleep. Making a bed consists of laying down some duvet and a pillow. Very traditional, and very foreign to most Americans -- us included. We didn't have particularly soft mattresses because we didn't have mattresses. We had a wooden floor. It was surprisingly comfortable, and had the handy side-effect that you could turn over in bed without making a horrible racket and bothering the other people in the room. I actually think that, if you want to get several people sleeping in the same room, Japanese-style bedding arrangements are one of the best possible ways to do it.

In the morning we went for a walk around scenic Danshui. When the British empire was active in the area, they used Danshui as a port. It was used for similar purposes by some other colonial powers, and it was the destination of the Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay. That makes for a very pretty town, with some foreign-looking architecture.

Here's a gallery of the photos I took.

We had lunch at the red castle, which used to be a Dutch fort, then a British consulate, and now is a restaurant with a good selection of seafood. I liked the oysters.

Danshui has got to be one of the prettiest places I've seen near Taipei -- right up there with Keelung, but with better weather.

More talking about food

I've discovered some more kinds of good food here. So, time to update the list:

There's a weird thing where a guy takes a pattie of some kind of mostly grain-based substance and cooks it on a griddle, then fluffs it up with a spatula, fries an egg under it, puts some sauce and maybe some herbs on it, and the folds it up like some kind of vaguely omelette type of thing. US$1.00 per thing, and each is about the same size as a McDonalds $1.00 hamburger but a lot tastier and more nutritious. It's good.

There's also a stall at the market which sells "water-fried Baozi". That's pronounced something like "Bao-Tzuuh", and it's a kind of Taiwanese dumpling with a meat and vegetables stuffing. They're good. Some of them seem to be filled with some sort of very concentrated chicken soup.

There's a stall which sells a dinner-sized container of pretty good sushi for US$2.50 in the evenings. I had one of those recently, and it was good stuff. I didn't recognize half the ingredients, but that's par for the course when it comes to eating in Taiwan.

Another really tasty way to get a fairly small amount of food (for lunch or something) is a fried chicken place. They have several different kinds of breaded chicken, and you pick one and they add some leaves and fry it for you. Then they add some salt and pepper and unidentified red spices.

A funny thing about eating in Taiwan is that you get used to meals being at least a little weird. For example, the standard way of serving fish for groups of people is to give them a dish containing a whole dang fish. Gutted and scaled, of course, and cooked -- but then they set it in the middle of the table, head and all, and expect you to just start chowing down. The usual way is to carefully remove some meat with a very large spoon, and put it in your rice bowl. I'm actually used to this. Hell, I enjoy this. Fish is tasty, and you get used to looking it in the eye while you cut it up. The same goes for shrimp, which are served with the head still attached. I don't know why they do this, as it seems to have nothing but disadvantages. You have to take the head off manually, which is easy but tends to result in shrimp brain juices squirting at you.

Another interesting thing about Chinese dining is the traditional family-style method of serving food. Each person gets a rice bowl and some chopsticks, and several dishes are put in the middle of a circular table. When you want some food, you take a bit of it from one of the communal plates and put it in your bowl of rice (held in your non-dominant hand) and then eat it with some rice. Then you go back for more. There are obvious sanitation issues with this approach, but after a little while you stop thinking about them. After all, I've been here for a while and the worst Taiwan has been able to give me is a mild cold.

If I may digress from food here, I'd like to gloat about my victory over the cold I came down with recently. A few days ago I got a bad sore throat, but I perservered with the aid of hard candies and water. Then it morphed into a stuffy/runny nose, and our enmity got serious. I got plenty of sleep, drank lots of water, ate nutritious food, and got chummy with diphenhydramine hydrochloride. I beat that cold like a dirty rug. I celebrated today with vigorous exercise. I AM VICTORIOUS!

Back to food. There's another place which sells a sweet bean soup. The price is reasonable and it sure tastes good. It contains some sort of maybe-rice-based balls, pieces of taro root, some kind of tuber, peanuts, and various kinds of beans. It's indigenous to Taiwan -- a regional specialty of the town of Jio Fen -- so I had better enjoy it while I still can! Because I don't think it's coming to America any time soon.