Mystery Meat

Taipei has got a lot to offer where food is concerned--that's not much of a mystery. I've even blogged about the food here already. Saturday was a special culinary delight, however, providing a quick glance at the surprising swath of food the capital city provides. In the morning, it was a tour through the flagship bakery of the How Sweet company located west of Taipei. We got the inside scoop on how the company bakes its famous pineapple cakes, and even got to slap on rubber gloves and mix together some pre-arranged ingredients to bake our own pineapple delights.

What horrors would such ghastly jars contain?

Today's cover photo is not a picture of a pineapple delight. It represents the other end of the cuisine spectrum--the weird end. We're not talking about east or west, here, we're just talking about strange food. Food that even locals don't quite care for, that's what's swimming in the pale amber soup above. 

To get there, we took a trip down the seediest alley of one of Taipei's famous Night Markets. We walked in to our desired restaurant to enjoy the very "Jekyll and Hyde" decór and glance at the menu, which was about as simple as an In-n-Out burger--only 4 or 5 menu options. (I'm not sure if they have In-n-Out style secret menu options. If they do, I really don't think I want to know what they are.)

Let me tell you more about the mystery meat. It was expensive. About five dollars for maybe four small pieces of meat with accompanying broth. It was a pain to eat--full of bones like a fish fillet but much less tender. It tasted just like chicken. It... really wasn't that exciting to eat. It wasn't super gross, nor was it super tasty (though the broth was quite delightful and rather relaxing. hmm...).  

After the eating experience, the only thought I had was: "Well, I ate it. Now I can go home and tell people that I ate it. And now I'm five bucks poorer. Let's go to your friend's party and eat pizza."  It was a fun experience--but listen good, you western folk you, the great thing about this is, it's not really a key cultural experience of the typical Taiwanese. In fact, my friend Janet, pictured below in the yellow shirt, is a Taiwan native and it was her first experience with the mystery meat too. To make things even more mundane, I'm certainly not the first foreigner to eat this, and this isn't even the weirdest food on the seedy alley that housed this ghoulish establishment. (next store you could eat an animal that starts with "s" and rhymes with "oft shell turtle"). 

So.. the point I'm trying to make is... it was so worth it. Enjoy the photos.

So what did I eat? Brownie points to the first comment from the western hemisphere that gets it right.

 LM 

yes. it's that good.

Family Home Evening

Mormons—those strange but pleasant neighbors of yours stealing away to church every Sunday morning, piling child after child into the Yukon, those kind friends of yours nervously handing you a copy of the Book of Mormon with a personal message scrawled in the inside cover, Yes, those Mormons, sending out sons and daughters to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ two-by-two all around the world. I'm one of them and oh how we love being peculiar.

Being as quirky as we are, we feel comfortable when we congregate. To us, though, it’s more than just chummy friendship, our church group is a family, and, like other Christian denominations, we follow the custom of referring to each other as brother or sister. We recognize, though, that there’s no family like the nuclear one, and, of course, that there’s no place like home. In keeping with this culture, church members worldwide follow counsel from church leaders to hold a weekly Family Home Evening  where siblings and parents gather to strengthen family bonds.

Taiwan, this island 6,000 miles away from the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah, is home to over 50,000 Mormons. The church here is organized the same way it is in the rest of the world. Heck, even the architecture is fairly standardized, especially the interior design with those famous half-carpeted walls, and familiar typography on room labels. And just like those well-groomed, white bread Utah neighbors in the West, the culture-rich, not-so-white-bread church members here the East, get together for a weekly family night.

Being among the young single adults here in Taiwan has been a special experience for me in this regard. Not to leave us out of the weekly family night tradition, the local members of our congregation take turns in hosting a family night on Sunday night for the singles. Every week we get together, share a meal prepared by the host family, enjoy a spiritual lesson lead by one of our peers, and top off the evening with a game or activity. Here’s a peek into one such family home evening – last night held at Sister Ding’s house here in Taipei:

Tonight's feast was Spaghetti with meat sauce with a side of broccoli and
potato salad. Eating the meal with chopsticks added to the authenticity. 

After dinner, Meiyi, seated left, presented a spiritual lesson on baptism. We separated into two groups--those baptized when we were 8-years old (the earliest age a person can receive baptism in the Church) and those who were baptized as converts later in life. We discussed our feelings about baptism as well as our memories of when we were baptized. It was a humbling experience to listen to the feelings of these my Taiwanese brothers and sisters and how, though an ocean apart, we all came to know Jesus Christ.

To cap off the evening, we did what the Taiwanese do best. Not build extremely tall buildings or establish successful, international computer companies; no, we played our favorite Paper, Scissors, Rock super-game which allowed us to wave our arms and say "hulu-hulu" and "huala-huala"

Family Home Evening is the highlight of my week here in Taipei.  It's in a language that I haven't quite mastered yet. It's with people I've only known for a month. But I couldn't feel more at home spending an evening with people I can without doubt call family. LM

Keep Calm and Feel Like an Idiot

Stay calm, and repeat after me.

On Saturday I got stung by a bee on my arm for the first time ever. Everyone got all worried and told me I needed to go pee on the sting right away. I stayed calm and felt like a little idiotic as I went into the bathroom and peeled off my shirt to make sure the bee wasn't still on me. I decided...not to follow the urination custom. That's... a bit too much culture for me.

The fact that Taiwanese people advocate using one's own urine as relief for bee stings  was just one of the lessons I learned this weekend. Here are a few others


1. Party Games Are an Eastern Delicacy  - The people here know a billion of them, most of them require little to know materials or set up, and they're all awesome. On Sunday at a small church activity we played a telephone-style game involving transmitting a message via charade. At the barbecue on Saturday, we played a game designed to trick your mind and make you look silly where you had to pantomime the motions of a boat in water. What pantomime you performed had to do with where you sat in relation to the person who was "it." Flailing arms, strange shouts of "hulu" "hu-ka" and "hua-hua" abounded. 


2. Paper, Rock, Scissors is Not Enough. The easterners have apparently become bored with the traditional  triangular battle schema of paper, rock, scissors, (PRS) and have devised an almost endless array of game variations to add to the fun.  My tutor here taught me last week a variation that involves a fast-paced PRS, followed by a contest of slap pantomiming. On Saturday, we played a PRS Hybrid that involved shouting "seaweed, seaweed!", and seaweed pantomiming. On SUNDAY, we played one with a circled up group that added hilarity with PRS duels being tossed around the circle amid shouts of "hulu-hulu," "hwala-hwala" and side-splitting.


3. Party Game Rules are a Foreign Language. You ever been at a party and you're playing this new fun game that everyone knows the rules of except you? Or maybe you're just taking longer than the rest to get what the rules are? You feel kinda retarded, right? Or maybe if you don't get it you just give up and let the natural flow of the game teach you how to play. Now take those feelings of awkwardness and imagine how they would multiply when you have to experience the same things in a foreign language. I always know I'm done for when the native speakers around me start asking clarification questions on rules. 

It was a weekend of lots of laughs, lots of strange, silly, inhuman chants, and lots of feeling like a complete idiot. It wasn't easy to stomach the awkwardness when I couldn't grasp something just because my brain couldn't process the Chinese fast enough. It wasn't easy to swallow my pride and avoid the temptation to constantly think "put all these people in a foreign language situation and see how they do!" 


I stomached, I swallowed, I endured. I'm not a hero. I'm just trying to be a friend. It's not hard to get over feeling like an idiot when you're around the best people on the planet earth. LM

When in Rome, Call Girls Fat.

The proper way to attack a Tawain style custard crépe.
Janet,  muching on the mango monstrosity
pictured below looks on.

So, according to some of my Taiwanese buddies here, "weight culture" is viewed a little bit differently. They seem to claim people in Taiwan are a little less sensitive about the scale, and that bringing up weight in casual conversation between friends is no big deal. I'll give an example. Girl spots an old friend who is male. They greet each other with happy "long-time-no-see's" whereupon the guy confidently jabs:

"You're fatter."

A similar custom, grabbing a finger-full of a friend's spare-tire chub, is a favored activity of my roommate.Now, I don't know about you folks, but something tells me that no matter what my good Taiwanese friends say, I don't think that kind of "compliment" is very widespread. Something about "When in Rome, call girls fat" just doesn't have the right ring to it. 

Now, I may be exaggerating and generalizing, but the above information may or may not be 100% true. Or, it could be totally false. Needless to say I've yet to adopt any of these traditions myself. The girls seem to appreciate that. (I even got complimented today on having a face that would probably be attractive to homosexuals. Score!)

No human should be consuming this.

I digress. Young friends, no matter what the customs are, I do give you full permission to call me fat when you see me again. I am eating like there's no tomorrow. Plump, pork or cabbage stuffed steamed buns for breakfast, plates full of of who-knows-what from the school cafeteria for lunch, and a rotating menu for dinner--stacks of potstickers or a dump of thick chow mein noodles, pulled and cut in house. Mmm.

But in Taiwan it's about more than eating the three squares--it's about eating way more than humanly possible. We're talking about more than a hobbit's second breakfast--this is late night, momma-told-you-not-to, street grazing at one of Taipei's local night markets. 

Life is good, here in Taipei. Don't worry mom, I'm eating well. Maybe too well. LM

In Taiwan, Men with Man Purses Read Comic Books

I've never really been much into comic books. When I was younger, though, I was a monthly devourer of the cheap-as-free Lego magazine which often included lego-themed comic adventures. However, while a handful of kids around me thrived on the good old fashioned panel-by-panel, especially Japanese anime comics known as manga, I never really advanced into the genre myself or into anime any further than furtively sneaking in an episode of Pokemon each week--on a school night!

Comic books have always seemed so old fashioned to me. You often here the older generation talk of treasured trips to the nearby comic book store to fork over a shiny nickel and catch up the latest exploits of superman or batman. So many aspects of that treasured memory are old news now--going to a brick-and-mortar store, for one, and actually reading something in physical print.

Taiwan is a modern place if there ever was one and Taipei is no exception. But despite the westernization with its Gucci and Louis Vitton invasion, and popularization of western film and media culture, I experienced last weekend something that took me back--to a time I've never known. A couple of my new friends here in Taiwan took me to a local comic book store, helped me pick out a comic book, and we read comic books. We sat down and paid a couple cents to read comic books in corner store before returning them on our way out. 

For Taiwan, this is just another fun Saturday night activity. It is fueled by neither nostalgia nor nerdiness, not even is it limited to people of a certain gender or age. I saw young teenagers and even 30-40 something men and women perusing different comics as well as discussing them at length. The store was packed, and it wasn't easy at first to find a place to sit.

Now, actually reading the comic book my buddy helped me pick out was a challenge in itself. I was amazed with how many characters I could actually comprehend, but I only managed to shuffle top-to-bottom, right-to-left through seven or eight pages in the hour we were in the store while one of my buddies polished off four or five full magazines, and my other friend two novel-thick comics. I give myself credit for trying--it was more a cultural experience than anything, really. Part of the challenge of the comic book was that not only is it written in Chinese characters, but the language of the particular book I was reading was set in an old school regal style--with phraseology equivalent to highly formal, antiquated formalities like "your excellency," and related ancient-sounding lingo. 

This is Manhua. Comics. Loved by old and young, male and female, unshaved fanboys, and even fashionable, skinny-tie-wearing, man-purse holding hipsters like my trendy friend in the cover photo. Happy reading!  LM

chinese bridge

In May I participated in a preliminary round of a worldwide contest known as Chinese Bridge. It's a Chinese proficiency competition involving speech delivery and talent presentation that ultimately brings together competitors from around the globe in the final rounds which are held as live broadcasts on national television in China. As the name "Chinese Bridge" indicates, the point of the competition is to foster international unity by building a Chinese linguistic bridge between countries cultures.


I had supposed I understood this aim--after all, Chinese has helped me build quite a few bridges to the middle kingdom from the mainland all the way down to Taiwan. Just a couple days ago, however, a small experience helped broaden my perspective. The lovely young lady in the picture above is not Chinese, (though when I leaned over to her in the restaurant we were sitting her asking for dish recommendations I sure thought she was). She's not from Taipei, nor Shanghai or Beijing. She's Japanese. And I discovered that by speaking with her in Chinese.


"Do you speak any English?" I asked her, aghast that we had been speaking for several minutes in fluid Chinese. "Not really," she replied with a chuckle." Our conversation continued for several more minutes without a break in speaking Chinese. Perhaps the experience may seem mundane to some, but I could not believe my ears. Not because I don't think Japanese people learn Chinese, but because I felt like I had hit a bullseye from 300 yards because of my decision two years ago to start formal Chinese training.


I don't think I've ever met someone from Japan before, much less spoken with one in Chinese. The last time I tried to speak Chinese to an Asian who wasn't Chinese, she looked at me funny and said, in crystal clear English, that she was Korean. This time around, I not only got a dinner recommendation, but I got to build a bridge to the land of the rising sun.


Pleasure to meet you, Haruna.
晴菜，認識妳我很高興。

Little Jonny Goes to School

ASU's Palm Walk has met it's match

Classes started this week. It’s a relief, really, you know? Shucks, we were just so tired of relaxing in hot springs, cruising the boardwalk on the north shore, getting massages from blind people, taking leisurely tours of culture-rich museums, and late night shopping adventures eating endless amounts of snacks and delicacies at crowded night markets. Thank goodness we've got a decent 9-5. Our troubles are over. It's a good thing that the typhoon predictions were way off for Taipei. To think...having to miss a day of classes being trapped with my roommate up here with nothing more than 100 cable channels...I perish at the thought.

 It’s an interesting set up we have for our classes. Most of us in the International Chinese Language Program (ICLP) are here just for the summer and, as newbies here we don’t get to choose our selection of courses. Instead, we’re assigned three different one-hour class blocks during the day. One of the classes is a one-on-one tutorial. The other are full sized classes...

...of four students a class.

That’s right: four students in a class. 1-2-3-4-5, oops I counted too high because no class ever is that small and I didn’t expect to be able to stop counting at four. The format is more discussion group than lecture, and it works like a charm. Tiny class sizes allows for near constant dialogue and participation among teacher and students. Everyone gets a chance to practice the new grammar point or answer a question about a new word or concept. The rhythm is therefore fast paced, and, at least this week, class periods fly by. There’s no time for idle chatter or texting. In fact, we’re not allowed to use a dictionary or even open our textbook during class. We are to come prepared--ready to not miss a beat.

I’m enjoying my classes so far. Apart from the almost unbearably unrealistic conversation dialogues we have to stomach in our Talks on Chinese Culture class, the rest of the material is fairly interesting like listening to and discussing old-timey Chinese radio plays in my morning class.

The brightest moment of every day so far, though, has been my one-on-one class. As fate would have it, I have been fortunate to have landed yet another on-point tutor. Like my tutor last year in Sichuan, Ms. Tu here at ICLP is keen to adapt her teaching method and content to the student (ME!) she keeps things interesting and fun and somehow manages to force me to use new sentence structures and vocabulary even though I hate nothing in this world more than being forced to use new sentence structures and vocabulary. She does it naturally, conversationally, making relevant connections between classroom content and content in my personal life. I’m impressed, I'm excited to go to class.

So far, so good, ICLP.  LM

Today's post is brought to you by Boo, the World's Cutest Dog.