oyceter. Taiwan trip photos, part 1

Finally, I start posting some of the pictures I took in Taiwan! I usually suck at taking pictures because I either forget my camera or forget to take pictures, so this is quite unusual for me (and is therefore totally blamed on

rachelmanija).

The picture taking didn't get off to a good start, as I hit the airport, saw a really cool iPod vending machine (at SFO, not Taiwan!), and discovered to my great chagrin that my camera wasn't in my backpack. I hoped against hope that I had somehow packed it in my luggage, but it was not so.

The night before, I had apparently very thoughtfully packed my camera charger, unloaded the SD card, reloaded it in the camera, and left the darn thing on my desk in California.

Thankfully, my dad had a camera that he let me steal for a while.

It was very, very hard taking pictures of food! One, everyone that I eat with looks at me funny. Even though my dad took pictures of basically every single meal when he went to Japan, he looked at me funny too (probably because I was taking pictures of the equivalent of take-out, not fancily arranged restaurant food). Plus, everytime I tried to take a picture in a weird location (read: the convenience store, the comic book store, any non-tourist place), I felt like a newspaper reporter or a spy. I even asked the convenience store lady for her permission! I think she thought I was a corporate spy from 7-Eleven or another company. My mom explained that I was from America and wanted to show my friends.

The people at the street stands wouldn't let me at all (probably because they're illegal and thought I might be working for the police, eh heh), so I had to sneak pictures over my mom's shoulder or somesuch. So there would be this bright flash while I took the picture of someone preparing whatever I had ordered, and then the guy would look around, totally confused, while I quickly hid the camera.

I also had a very hard time figuring out what to take pictures of, besides the food. I wanted to give people a good feel of Taiwan, but I felt silly taking pictures of the streets. I couldn't figure out what people would find interesting, so mostly you have random photos and things that I thought were funny or possibly culturally illuminating. Or just weird. You know.

Anyhow, I've got pictures of the first few days in Taiwan, which were fairly low-key and non-note-worthy. Watch out! There are a ton of them, and this is just the tip of the iceberg! I friends-locked some pictures (pretty much anything with people I knew, or me), so that's why some things might show up strangely.

ETA: Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

First dinner in Taiwan

My first dinner! I'm eating in front of the TV by myself because my parents abandoned me. Ok, actually because they were invited somewhere else, and I didn't care because I was so tired.

Anyhow, there's a bowl of noodles on the left (clear mung bean noodles, very light soup) and beef rolls (niou rou juen bing), which are slices of cooked beef with some tasty sauce and scallions, rolled up in a flat dough thing.

Yay almost-street food!

Homecooked meal!

Yay! Well, mostly it's homecooked. The smoked fish, tea eggs, tendons, red-stewed things, and boiled peanuts are little side dishes that my mom bought. The eggplant (mmmmm) are probably leftovers, and the noodles are cooked up for the meal. The soy sauce with garlic dipping sauce is for the pork from the pork and winter melon soup, which I didn't get a picture of. But the soup is very mild, and the pork isn't very heavily flavored and cooked to softness, and I love it.

My mom!

I take a picture of my mom preparing noodles!

Gift box

Here's a gift box that we got because someone was getting married. I think people give them a lot (we always seem to have a few in the house). I think chocolate's not quite as popular in Taiwan, because the cookies are always delicately flavored with vanilla or coffee or something. I like them a lot though. Also, the boxes are pretty.

Dead duck

It looks like a dead duck without the wine bottle! My dad really likes wine, so people always give him stuff for wine. And sooner or later, people run out of ideas. Ergo, duck. I thought it was funny.

Flowers

People give flowers a lot as presents as well. Christmas, New Year, congratulations, etc. etc. Usually they're orchids. I like this better because they're potted. I always feel bad for the cut flowers, even though I know I'll just end up killing them anyway.

Wine refrigerator

Yes, my dad actually has a wine refrigerator. Yes, it is almost full. Anyhow, the red thing on the door is a "Full" symbol ("man" in Chinese). Usually you're supposed to stick it on wherever you keep rice for New Year's... it's a tradition to say that you'll always have rice. But my mom was having fun and stuck it on my dad's wine refrigerator so he'd always have wine ;).

Waffles!

I love waffles! I'm so sad I can't seem to find any good Belgian ones in CA, though Houston had some tasty ones. In Taiwan, they're usually served with whipped cream and honey (so now I like honey on waffles and pancakes better than maple syrup), and sometimes with ice cream. And then there are the savory waffles....

Mmmm, savory waffle

Why yes, that is whipped cream and a cherry on top of the tuna waffle. And might I add that in Taiwan, tuna is very often served with mayo and ketchup. I don't know why, but I swear, it tastes good! I have very fobby tastes ^_^. But the tuna waffles! They are good!

Manga store

My mom, talking on her cell phone, in a manga store. They're not everywhere in Taiwan, but all the bookstores sell manga, and convenience stores will always have new issues of the most popular things. So this is still a sort of specialty store because it stocks the toys and the artbooks and etc. But look at all the manga! The wall my mom is at and the one to her left is all shoujo, and the one she's in front of is actually a rolling shelf, so it's two shelves deep.

Street in Hsinchu

Totally random street scene in Hsinchu. Note all the scooters. There's even a space blocked out for the scooters on the street, not that any of them use it. Also note all the air conditioners sticking out from the windows. During summer, you have to be careful where you're walking or you'll get dripped on by them.

Manga store, view 2

Another view of my manga store! This time it's the shounen manga, along with the shelf of artbooks and what appears to be skin magazines. Yay?

Matchmaker ad

The big red thing is a giant billboard above the bank we were going to. It's advertising a dating service to specifically help you meet a doctor. I'm not sure if I just never noticed or if they really are more prevalent now, but this time, these matchmaking/dating services were everywhere, I swear!

Convenience store

I can't remember which convenience store this is, only that it's not 7-Eleven (my personal favorite). Convenience stores are pretty big in Taiwan and in Japan, so much so that you can pay for parking tickets and etc. there. Also, I've found they're a lot cleaner than the ones in the States. Also, cute foods! Strangely, not much soda gets sold in Taiwan, so all the drinks in the back that you see are mostly juice and tea.

Convenience store, part 2

Another view! I love the convenience stores because they have handy food that you can quickly eat, like hot dogs, baozi, and assorted sandwiches, onigiri and etc.

Convenience store, part 3

And the drinks... All tea! Or water! Or juice! There's soda at the very bottom, but not that much, compared to Safeway. Also, I miss juice boxes. They're just the right size.

Traffic

This is an awful photo, but mostly I was trying to get a shot of the red "20." It's a countdown for the red lights! I love it! I think it's so cool! I wish they had that here!

Wu chao shou

Here's my mom paying at Wu Chao Shou, a sort of hole in the wall place in Hsinchu. Chao shou are basically wontons that are served with some mixing sauce (usually chili oil and soy sauce), as opposed to being served in soup. I like this place. It's cheap and tasty.

Mom at Wu Chao Shou

Here's my mom at Wu Chao Shou

Wu Chao Shou table

A table setting at Wu Chao Shou.

Haagen-Dazs

Heh heh, I am taking even more pictures of a convenience store! I like them quite a lot! Anyhow, this is 7-Eleven (my favorite!), and here's the Haagen-Dazs. I don't know if you can see, but I took the picture just because they have azuki bean flavor along with the normal strawberry, vanilla and etc.

7-Eleven!

Here's one of my favorite parts of 7-Eleven! The ready-made lunches! I ate lunch from a convenience store an awful lot when I was doing homestay in Japan too. I didn't get a picture of the onigiri because my mom was waiting outside, but here's some spaghetti and katsudon and etc. The onigiri were the best, though, and Taiwan comes up with non-Japanese ones like a kimchi onigiri, a shredded dried pork (rou song) onigiri and bacon and chicken and etc.

Wu Chao Shou food

Here's the food that we got from Wu Chao Shou -- the box of cabbage, the cold noodles with peanut sauce, chicken and cucumber (tasty), and the eponymous chao shou (non-spicy). The back stuff are things leftover from a previous meal.

Hat!

The cuteness tag is for the hat and my haircut, not me! I love the hat! It is white and fuzzy. And my haircut is happy as well. I kept trying hats on because I love hats and my mom was getting impatient. (we're in the basement of Sogo in Hsinchu... Sogo's a Japanese department store, except they went bankrupt in Japan but continue to thrive in Taiwan)

Hua Chuan Yan

Here's a hot pot restaurant that my mom and her friends went to in Chubei (north of Hsinchu). The city is getting more popular, and all these nice restaurants are springing up, especially ones designed to look like old-fashioned Chinese places.

Hua Chuan Yan hot pot

Hot pot! The top half is the mah-lah part (super spicy) and the bottom half is some sort of pickled vegetable soup. You just sit around and put things like vegetables and tofu and meat in and cook it and dip it in a sauce you make and eat it.

Hot pot ingredients

Here's some of the lamb meat, plus my bowl of dipping sauce. Usually at home we don't have the flavored hot pots, so I just use soy sauce, raw egg and shacha sauce (no idea what it is in English or what it's made of). Here they recommended no sha cha, scallions and vinegar for the spicy hot pot and sha cha and other things for the non-spicy one.

Pig blood cake

Weird Chinese food alert! The blackish triangle is a pig blood cake. The whole thing isn't really congealed blood, but it's sticky rice formed into a cake and flavored with blood. It's tasty, it really is. This one was especially tasty and chewy.

Traditional dessert

Sweet soups are a pretty traditional dessert (I think they're usually Cantonese? Not sure at all). I tend to avoid them unless they're sweet bean soups b/c they're very sweet, but they're supposed to be tasty and good for you. The red things are some sort of Chinese herb medicine thing, and there's a little triangular slice of lotus root in there, along with clear fungus bits. The fungus is chewy and a little crunchy. I didn't finish mine.

Me in front of Angela's

Here's me in front of Angela's, the bakery that my mom's friend (also my friend's mom) opened.

Angela's

Here's my mom (left), Duan ahyi (my mom's friend), and another ahyi/auntie who I don't know who co-owns the store.

Me at Angela's

Here's a picture of me in front of all the goodies.

Us at Angela's

Me, my mom, and Duan ahyi at her store.

Bakery goodies

Cakes and desserts at Angela's bakery. I love Taiwan bakeries because everything's so pretty. Also, there are things like green tea mousse cakes or whatnot (I swear, they're good).

Taiwan toilet

Eh heh heh. It's a Taiwan toilet! Lately most of the toilets are Western-style, but pretty much all the toilets at my school were like this. You basically squat over it. Some people think they're cleaner than the Western style ones because you're not actually sitting on seats that everyone has sat on already.

Gifts

These are cute little packages of Japanese treats that someone gave my dad.

Gifts, part 2

Here's what was inside the gifts. I love how the individual wrappers match the big packaging! I didn't actually open any of them, but I suspect they were some type of bean paste filled pastry thing.

Gifts, part 3

Aaaand, I forgot why I took this picture.

Homecooked meal, Part 2!

Mmmmm, my mom made this! Except the boiled peanuts, which are leftovers from the first picture or so. The fish is red-stewed (hong shao), and there's a tofu stew thing with a little beef and spinach, and then onion-ribs (yang tsong pai gu), which are braised in soy sauce with stewed onions. I need to make that for myself some day.

Mom and dad

My dad is in PJs that he stole off the airplane. Um, yes. It runs in the family? (I steal ketchup packages and the little hotel shampoos and stuff)

Department store food court

Pretty much all the department stores have food courts in the basement (I think in Japan they're on an upper level, and in America they're in the middle of the mall).

Mom and friends

My mom, Lin ahyi and her daughters, after we went karaoke-ing! J. is so tall! I can't believe T. is going to college now!

Me and J. and T.

Toilet paper

Um, yes, I am taking more pictures inside of the bathroom. I would just like to note the presence of toilet paper and seat covers. The toilet paper started becoming more prevalent when I was in high school. Before then, you'd just carry your own pack of tissue around everywhere. And the seat covers seem to be becoming the norm as well! Yay!

Plastic food

Sadly, the art of plastic food in Taiwan isn't as sophisticated as it is in Japan, but there are still plastic food displays. Usually they're for Japanese food anyway. I wonder if they import them. Anyway, they were a humongous help in Japan, because then you could just bring the waitress out and point at something and have some notion of what you were ordering.

Nighttime street scene

Not much to see here, just another hole in the wall pearl milk tea (aka bubble tea)/all sorts of drinks place, which I love. I didn't have any pearl milk tea this time =(.

Taiwan food stands

So I keep talking about the food stands on the street, and I wanted to show them to people. This is a street full of them in Hsinchu. I couldn't get close enough, but on the right, you can see the beginning of the stands.

Street stand

This is basically what a street stand looks like. I think this one is for some sort of vegetarian hot pot, so you just pick certain foods and they cook it for you.

Another street stand

Oooo, I hadn't seen these before! (of course, now that I've typed this, my sister will email me and tell me that I have and got excited and that I just forgot, which sounds exactly like something I'd do). Anyway, in Taiwan, there are stands that make little egg cake things and fill them with butter and/or red bean paste. This stand ups it a notch and lets you put in tuna or chocolate or strawberries. I got the tuna and corn, because I love tuna and corn in random things (my favorites are tuna and corn crepes, waffles, and pizza). Sadly, there was too much buttery stuff and the outside was too soggy. But the concept was a good one!

Mi fun (rice noodles)

Hsinchu is famous for its rice noodles. Here's a bowl that we got in downtown Hsinchu, in a place that's half street stand and half hole in the wall place. It was good. We didn't get the soup one because it wasn't too cold outside, so this is the rice noodles mixed with meat sauce and bean sprouts and other things. My mom is trying to pick out all the parsley.

Mi fun stand

You can't really see, but the mass of people behind my mom are people eating at the place we just had mi fun at. My mom says it's very popular. Most of them are eating at tables set out on the sidewalk, and a few are eating in this teeny room (so a hole in the wall), ergo the crossbreeding between hole-in-the-wall and street stand.

Portuguese egg tart

I love Portuguese egg tarts (pu shr dan ta), which are so called because they were brought in here from Macau and were immensely popular when I was in high school. The fad's died down a bit, but you can get them at KFC. The difference from normal egg tarts is that the crust is flaky puff pastry and the top is carmelized sugar. KFC was selling ginger/sweet potato ones, which I wanted to try, but they were out, so this is a normal one (I got a sweet potato one later).

New year couplet

I don't know if there's any term in English, but the two long strips of paper are called "chun lien" (spring.. uh... something) in Chinese. They're a matched couplet, usually having something to do with luck or fortune or spring coming in. My mom did the calligraphy on this one!

They're always seven words per strip. The first four go together and the last three go together, like Chinese poetry, and they're supposed to match like Chinese poetry. So the first one (on the right) read "Bing sue (some type of time thing, like year of the dog) welcome spring spring enters doors" and the next one says "somthing year (matches the bing sue) welcome (but different word than the first) luck/fortune, luck/fortune enters door (different characters as well)". The middle character is a giant "Spring." Sometimes there's a strip on top of the door as well.

Me in front of the chun lien

My mom in front of the chun lien

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Want egg tarts now. WANT.

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Taiwan trip photos, part 1

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