We write a blog entry about food and drink for every country we visit. Why this is we don’t know, we are not gluttons, it just happened that way. Here comes the report for Taiwan: If you can kill it, you can fry it and if you can fry it, you can eat it. This may sound a little unfair and had I written this entry before we left the country it may have sounded a little different. Sure, the egg burrito things (gently fried) were nice and the dumplings (gently fried or abrasively steamed) were good too. However, nothing we ate in Taiwan appeared to be much better than cultural fast food. Their hotpot concept is quite good though – an all you can eat buffet of fresh veggies, meat and seafood that you cook yourself in a pot of broth at your table. However, much like poor Chang’s Mongolian Grill on Broadway, the excitement of creating your own custom soup wears thin once you realize that it all ends up tasting the same no matter how custom you make it.

The trick to Taiwan is to go to the harbour and buy the fish straight from the boat. Thanks to Ed and Sue we had the chance to do this. Not far from their vacation home is a harbour and fish market. We purchased about US$60 of crab, shrimp and fish, marched up the hill to a restaurant and paid them $10 to cook up the whole lot. Now, we realized that $60 sounds like a lot for backpackers but Sue negotiated a good deal and it took two of us to carry all the seafood away. OK, we are gluttons.

From a drink perspective Taiwan fares a little better. Ni-Cha is milk tea. Delicious hot or cold it is black tea with condensed milk and lots of sugar syrup. It’s cheap, good and too addictive. Starbucks, of course, is everywhere yet what is more pleasing to the eye is all the Starbucks clones that have sprung up. This is great because these are all domestic companies emulating the success of the big conglomerate. This provides the young people of Taiwan somewhere to hang out and meet friends, semi-decent coffee and, most importantly, employment and business opportunities. Starbucks isn’t all evil and although we have yet to succumb to our home brew, we are happy to drink from the fountain of their competitors when the need for the familiar arises.

Beer comes courtesy of the Taiwan Beer Company who produce a local brew unimaginatively called Taiwan Beer. $2.50 for 600ml is a fair price to pay and its taste is also fair. Not as vicious as Chang beer in Thailand and not as refined as Kingfisher in India, it does what you want it to do and probably what you bought it for in the first place.

What prompted the kill it, fry it, eat it remark was Korea. By comparison, the food here is great. Even without the comparison it is a pleasant and welcome surprise. It may even be good for you having the highest protein to fat ratio of any Asian country we’ve visited thus far. It’s also reasonably priced and most importantly tastes fresh and natural. Long gone are the hopes of finding a dinner for a dollar as in India but $8 buys you a finely prepared dinner here. The meal is based around a central dish. Perhaps a soup, or a bowl of tofu or even BBQ’d pork. The central dish is basic and perhaps a little bland but don’t worry because your table will soon be overloaded with anywhere between five and fifteen side dishes. Some sides are there to add into your basic dish and some are there to give your palate a little burst of life when it’s time to take a break from the spice. All the tastes are monochromatic, even the fiery hot dishes are just chili hot not curry hot. There is not the complexity of spices that are found, for example, in Indian food. Think of having a table of dishes like paints on an artist’s palate, primary tastes that can be blended to make an almost infinite array of secondary flavors.

The centerpiece of the Korean meal appears to be the DIY table barbecue. It used to be either pork or beef based but there currently seems to be some trouble with American beef and the Korean government have stopped imports from the US. This is putting up the price of US beef here to around $35/lb. The Koreans are very upset by this and just like the Iraq war we (Sarah and David) are personally asked/blamed for it. Not surprising I guess because I doubt the US government cares what the Koreans think when the domestic market is all that really matters. The BBQ is fun. Pig meat and table flamethrower. The natives let the waiter start cooking the meat and then take over but we are considered too inexperienced to handle cooking for ourselves so the restaurant staff do it all including using scissors to cut our food into more manageable chopstick sized pieces. It’s like being five years old again and I feel like it – the chopsticks are flat, not round, and are almost impossible to use with any grace. Secretly, I think the Koreans have a hard time with them too because a spoon is always provided and used by everyone. The Japanese, probably the most adept chopstick users I’ve seen, wouldn’t be caught dead with a spoon in their hand. The BBQ comes with lettuce leaves to wrap the cooked meat in and, again, many various side dishes. I mentioned earlier that there is practically no fat in the Korean meals, well, the BBQ is where they make up for it. The belly of the pig is considered to be the best part. Apparently a fat animal is a healthy one and a week’s worth of careful eating vanishes at the mercy of the cracklin’.

Kim Chi is the national dish. Basically it’s raw cabbage pickled in vinegar and chili and comes with every meal. I read in the newspaper that a Korean Tourist Board survey of foreign visitors revealed that 86% of tourists tried Kim Chi. From this statistic I can only deduce that 14% of visitors must eat exclusively at McDonalds because Kim Chi is served with every single meal in every single restaurant. And, should you polish off the whole plate of the stuff, another will arrive immediately. This holds true of all the side dishes, they just keep on coming, whether you want them or not. Our guidebook mentions the Korean government are trying to encourage restaurants to end this practice because of food wastage but I doubt that will ever happen.

The one thing the Koreans seem to be coming up short on is decent drinks. There are a fair amount of coffee-shops all serving lattes, americanos and whatnot but these are expensive and have the look of bad coffee. Perhaps it’s frothy Nescafe and at $3.50 a cup it doesn’t bode well for a value-for-money experience. Besides these Asian countries don’t really have a cafe culture where you can nurse the single cup you can afford for as long as you like whilst browsing the paper. Apparently their tea is very famous so we tried a $4 cup and it was good and fruity but the cup was small and instead of leaving with the taste of tea in our mouths we left with the taste of tourism. Haven’t tried the beer yet but again, the Hofs (bars) look very unappealing and the occasional Western Bar we run into just says $8 beer and ex-pats. I think we have to wait to get to China for beer again. In the meantime, we’ve bought green tea bags from the 7-11 and because every hotel has a hot water machine and mugs in their rooms we’ve been enjoying cheap tea in the comfort of home.

Breakfast? Forget about it. We’re buying the only box of cereal the 7-11 sells, a carton of milk and eating it from the coffee mugs in our room with our sporks.

Korean cuisine is not the most imaginative but it’s healthy and practical with just a little kick when you need it. A bit like Korea really.

To wake up in the morning in Amsterdam and go to bed that night in Taiwan is a crazy thing. Firstly, it takes 19 hours of travel to be able to accomplish such a feat of contrasting sleeping environments. But aside from flying time (small digression, we did so via Singapore Airlines and true to reputation, it was a very nice airline indeed and the food is really good…), it struck me as rather mind-boggling that Amsterdam and Taipei can co-exist simultaneously on the same planet. Over in Amsterdam people are living very Dutch lives and in Taipei people are living very Taiwanese lives and this is all happening at the same time, every single day and the Dutch aren’t thinking about the Taiwanese and the Taiwanese aren’t thinking about the Dutch. After all our traveling, David and I have started to view the world as being rather small but in this one moment, I felt the hugeness of the world and I truly did feel like I was on the other side of it.

Here are some things I quite liked about Taiwan:

Only one other time, out of all the times we’ve landed at an airport, have any of the people greeting friends and family been there to greet us. That first time was Beth for our trip to Amsterdam last summer and it was quite heavenly to see her smiling face. We felt the same being greeted by our friends, Ed and Sue. They whisked us way to their beach house on the northern tip of the island and we slept and slept and slept so good in the fresh ocean air, windows open, a nice fan blowing, birds to greet us in the morning. It was lovely. And then Ed generously shared his imported Vivace coffee with us and the morning could not have been more perfect.

Speaking of morning beverages, one of my favorite parts of traveling thus far has been acclimating to and embracing the local morning brew. I have so far succeeded 100% – sure enough, sooner rather than later I can no longer live without my morning cup of whatever is going. My Taiwanese beverage addiction was Ni Cha Bing, iced milk tea. yummy yummy in my tummy. Of course, the Taiwanese are not big milk drinkers so I have no idea what kind of ‘milk’ my milked tea was milked with, I’m hoping soy. And the Taiwanese also love sugar. So I had Sue teach me how to request no sugar: quasi-phonetically it is: ching booyow taang. But then of course there was that one time where it wasn’t possible to have it without so I had it with and I will never go back. I mean really, how can anyone resist the shot of sweetened condensed milk thrown on top?? Why would you even consider? Speaking of tops, the Taiwanese have invented the most ingenious to-go cup beverage top adhesive machine that glues this thin little top to your cup and you poke a straw through it and you are set to go with a spill proof bevvie. Love it.

In preparation for our upcoming 3 1/2 weeks in China, Ed and Sue taught us a bunch of hopefully useful Chinese vocabulary words. Ed’s Chinese, after 6 years of continuous lessons and marrying a native speaker, is excellent. He actually gave us most of the words. We can now order fried noodles or rice with any variety of meat product, vegetables, beer, dumplings steamed or pan-fried, milk tea, tea without milk, this, that, do you have, toilet, please, may I ask a question and can we have a discount. oh, we also hopefully know how to say any variety of transportation.

On the topic of transportation, Taipei has by far, without a doubt in my mind, the best #1, all-time greatest, cleanest, most reliable metro system and also has the best public toilets ever. I promise. It also have the strangest garbage pick-up system I’ve ever encountered. One is not allowed to leave one’s garbage on the sidewalk to be picked up. You must be home to actually throw it in the passing truck yourself. And just like the ice-cream man, the garbage truck has a catchy little tune it plays so that you know it’s approaching. It’s Fur Elise and it’s played very very loudly.

To escape the noise assault that is any Asian city, one can visit Longshan Temple. Actually, it’s a pretty noisy place as well but for some reason I think it is my favourite site. I’m choosing this even over the very famous Taroko National Park with its breathtaking gorges and stunning bright red bridges set against lush green trees. I’m choosing this temple because it’s not actually a tourist site, is a real life working temple. We sat there for about an hour and I drifted into an almost comatose state of relaxation watching everyday people of Taiwan coming to this temple after work to do their praying and offering and incense lighting. I sat watching their routine of lighting the incense, bowing over and over, mumbling things, bowing again, and placing the incense. I watched the old ladies all sitting around gossiping together as they made an endless number of flower arrangements. I was most transfixed watching a tiny old woman tend to her job of keeping the enormous candelabra clean. She removed the burned down candles, scraped off wax, replaced some candles, re-arranged and then would shine the metal free of soot and fingerprints. Over and over and over and over, around and around and around, going up and down a step stool…..I could have watched her all day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longshan_Temple

There were loads of good times shared with Ed and Sue and we thank them for being such generous hosts and showing us their lovely country. Playing pool to Hotel California and plenty of Taiwan Beer (winner of most creative beer name), seeing Ed’s band play live, congee at 1am, and of course the front-yard hole in the ground bbq, just to name a few Long live the death trap, I mean, Scooby Do Mystery Machine.

We are now in Korea where I am desperately missing the Ni Cha Bing, see I told you. More on that to come……

Dave says:
Green Island is awaiting a tsunami. It’s a small island lying 30km off the south east corner of Taiwan and right in the middle of the typhoon path. The tropical greenery, dormant volcano and rather shabby tourist town are getting ready for the big one. Unlike weather tsunamis however, the locals know exactly when this is one is going to hit: every Saturday from now until October.

We happened to arrive on Monday and the town looked as if it had recovered quickly from the last storm to pass through. The thousands of scooters were all lined up in a row and the restaurants that could seat a hundred diners at a time were neatly awaiting the next onslaught. As with most Asian countries, workers do not get a great deal of vacation so they try hard to make the weekend work for them. Ed informs us that a five day work week is comparatively new here so perhaps they have a lot of pent up weekends away to exorcise. For us it was peaceful. So peaceful in fact, that most of the shops were closed and a good deal of the restaurants were empty of both patrons and supplies. Taiwanese tumbleweeds rolled down Main Street.

On the upside though, all the tourist attractions were completely devoid of tourists but a little short on attraction. Green Island is home to one of only three natural salt water hot springs in the world and we had the whole place to ourselves, all day. The average Taiwanese is a bit of a wuss when it comes to the weather. They don’t like to get sunned or rained upon and umbrellas are used like force fields against both. Combine the absence of local tourists with the impracticability of taking an umbrella to a hot spring and you’re left with just the mad-dogs and Englishmen who go out in the midday sun. We both got a little sunburned though which definitely makes us look like the stupid big-nose westerners. The other big draw of the island is the limestone cave. Thinking big we headed there early to avoid the crowds we’d seen in the tourist brochure. Seeing small though we noted that the combined size of the coffee stand and small tacky souvenir shop were about five times the size of the cave. Again, we were the only visitors and even the mosquitoes felt lonely and snuggled up to my ankle for comfort and a snack.

All this would change however! We headed back into town for a fruit juice (fruit syrup from a can, ice from who-knows-where). As we sat enjoying our sugar-fest we heard the roar of Harleys . In actuality it was just a lot of 125cc scooters as right in front of us passed a Hells Angels chapter of bikers. Nah – it was a convoy of about 25 scooters all being ridden by old people. Not one of them was under 65 and most of the guys had their wives riding shotgun, holding on for dear life but with a wide semi-toothless grin poking out from their sunhats which in turn were poking out from under their helmets. We laughed. We laughed all the way around the corner until we saw they had parked outside our hotel and were in the process of checking in. The previous night we had the whole hotel to ourselves now we had to share with fifty 70 year-olds hell bent on having a good time. We knew that getting to sleep wouldn’t be a problem, old folks barely make it past 7pm but, just like babies, they can’t understand why screaming at 6am is both socially and morally wrong.

As events transpired, it was not the oldies that woke us bright and breezy the next morning but the hotel’s PA system announcing to the oldies now was the time to get up for the day’s organized activities. Wakey, wakey , rise and shine (only in Chinese). We bumped into them again later that day at the visitor’s center. They were all in the activity room, far from active, fast asleep. Then their tourist bus tooted them awake – time to climb aboard for the next attraction.

And so, we left the peaceful Green Island on the vomit comet of a ferry thus called not because the crossing was rough but because so many people had previously thrown up in the cabin it smelt a little like the bathroom at our dearly missed Comet tavern in Seattle. Green Island was fun but more fun because we just about had the whole island to ourselves.

What remains the most fascinating contradiction in Asia is what some travel writers refer to as “the old and the new” but what I prefer to call “superstition and capitalism”.

Taipei is a booming metropolis. Home to the world’s tallest building, its technological achievement reflected in all the one hundred and one floors of Taipei 101. It stands not only as the capital of Taiwan but as the capital in capitalism. Yet, next to the headquarters of the world’s technology producers (take a look at the underside of the device you’re reading this on) you may well find a Chinese herbalist, a temple or maybe a small shrine. One oddity we’ve taken great pleasure in observing is a daily ritual practiced by many shops both large and small. Everyday they drag a table onto the sidewalk and onto the table they place food. In a small garbage can next to the table they scrunch up then light newspaper. It looks to us as if a rather low-rent BBQ is about to commence and when the employees gather round I’m certain smores are sure to follow. But this isn’t the staff lunchroom, it’s time to offer the gods food and cold hard cash in return for health and, of course, handsome profit margins on that afternoon’s takings. They burn money too but this isn’t real money, it’s ghost money and this looks to me to be a ghost religion too – it’s less devotional and more pragmatic than what we in the west are used to. It appears to be a pure business transaction. The fake money combined with the bad food isn’t going to earn anyone any favors from up on high unless they trying to catch the attention of a rather chubby Chinese god with a weakness for Pringles and Pocky. These are token gestures not devotional sacrifices. After the ceremony, the food is consumed by the staff (apparently it’s rude to re-gift) and someone is elected to sweep the burnt chards of newspaper from the store front and from the stock hanging outside. We even saw this ritual being performed in front of a sizable consumer electronics store. It seems ironic that in this flat screened, broadband accessed nation, wealth and prosperity can only be achieved by lighting a small bonfire on a city sidewalk and burning some stinky incense.

On the subject of stinky, a very popular dish here is called Stinky Tofu. Sometimes food translations are lost from Chinese to English but in this case the translation is quite accurate in both lexicographical and olfactory terms. It STINKS! It also tastes as much like it smells although the smell was so overpowering I couldn’t exactly say what it tasted like. As always, we will do a separate food and beverage report but I just had to get that off my chest and out of my nose.

Back to superstition and capitalism. There is no superstition where Taipei 101 is concerned. The world’s tallest building is at great pains to point out that no sidewalk bonfires were in anyway utilized in its construction. China wants the tallest record so badly that 101 may not be the superlative by the time you read this, the honor may have moved to Shanghai. Whatever the Chinese want they get except, it appears for a smooth passage for the Olympic torch. I digress. I wonder if the 101 has a fourth floor? The hotel we stayed in the other night was distinctly missing its fourth floor. The elevator went from 3 to 5 and another hotel elected to number its floors 1,2,3,D. Four is the number of death and not even the Taipei Hilton could give its fourth floor rooms away lest you go to sleep – permanently. I think this is one of those Spinal Tap “This one goes to eleven” moments though because surely the grim reaper is smart enough to realize a building with four floors must have a fourth floor even if it’s called the fifth. But then, we must never let superstition/religion get in the way of earning a NT$ or two no matter which faith you follow.

When we hit mainland China I suspect we’ll see more of this or perhaps the contradiction won’t be so great. Taiwan is a hot-rock of progress, consumerism and technology. Everything you could possibly want in life is here but you may have to pray a little harder to get it.