Taiwanese Food

I'm sure this is something you're all wondering about, namely, what do we eat? Honestly, mostly rice. Three of the five days we have lunch at school it is rice. Straight up, not fried, no sauce, just plain white rice. The other two days rotate between noodles, curry rice, fried rice, and dumplings. You'll notice we could easily eat nothing but rice an entire week at lunch. An egg dish (hard to describe, looks like flan), a vegetable dish (cooked cabbage or other greens, maybe beans or, more lately since I mentioned I liked it, pickled cucumbers and garlic). We get meat (usually small spiced sausage) maybe 2 or 3 times a month. As you can tell, our cook is Taiwanese and cooks only Taiwanese dishes, with slight accomandation for American tastes (potatoes in the curry, for example). Breakfast is always toast with jam, hence the request. Dinners we are on our own. Usually we cook or skip dinner one night and go to food street the next. If we cook, it's pancakes, pork steaks, or teriyaki noodles. On food street, we've been favoring pork dumplings, although the lunchbox places are pretty safe too. The dumpling woman is very nice, but she can't help laughing at our Chinese. Paul has gotten pretty good at figuring out what people are asking, even though his Chinese is limited to "I want." And of course, we have our nightly bing shao or iced juice.

We've been lucky, in that Taiwanese candy is surprisingly good, although anyone who complains about American chocolate being waxy needs to try this stuff. Candy bars or wafer cookies with hazelnut cream filling are very popular here and delicious. If I can figure out how to send some without melting, I will. American candies are represented if they are Twix, KitKat(which are NASTY here), or M&Ms. Most imported candies are from Germany (most of the Kinder line, for example) or Turkey (which makes a mean hazelnut bar).

Once a paycheck, we do go wild and go to American restaurants like McDonalds. We haven't been to KFC yet, but we plan to go on Thursday. Our roomies described it as "the food of the gods," so we're excited to try it. It seems like every week we find a new place to eat, which is nice.

Finally, I would like to give a belated birthday shout-out to my dad, who is now 53 yrs old. Tressa told me all about the birthday dinner and I was very envious. Beef is all imported, so it's really expensive and can be harder to find here. Plus, I just miss American food.