Dinner

At the orientation weekend in Hualien, Rotex made a movie about how dinner here is different from dinner everywhere else. I didn't believe them until a few weeks later.

At home, we all have a plate with food already on it and we're expected to eat it all, or we don't get dessert, if there is dessert that is. Here, the tables are round and they all have a huge Lazy Susan in the middle. Everyone gets an empty plate and a set of chopsticks and the food is placed on the Lazy Susan, so you can pick what you want and not pick what you don't want. In a way, I like this arrangement. But the food doesn't all come at once. One dish is brought out at a time and the next doesn't usuallycome until the first is almost gone. So if you don't like what the food is, you'll be waiting a while until something new comes. This is usually at restaurants and Rotary dinners.

One thing I've learned is that the first course if usually sashimi. I'm getting used to that. If I use soy sauce and wasabi, I don't really notice the rubbery texture as much. A girl from the States actually told me she thought I was really brave because I'm not afraid to try all the food that's offered to me! Wow, Mom would be proud. I'm such a good exchange student.

Anyway, I've yet to see a traditional Taiwanese meal served without a fish course. I posted a picture on facebook of my dinner on my third night here. It is actually an entire fish that looks like someone just pulled out of the ocean and stuck in the oven. The eyes are still there and everything! It still scares me when the fish comes to the table. And everyone just picks at it with their chopsticks! Another thing that bugs me is that at dinners like this, the chopsticks are always plastic. Plastic and metal chopsticks are really hard to use. I'm just getting used to wooden ones, but I think I'm almost ready to graduate to plastic. People know that I'm not from here, so when they see me struggling to pull a hunk of fish away from the rest of it, they ask if I want a fork. But I answer in Chinese that no, I would not like I fork. I can do this. I don't know if people are more surprised at the fact that I can actually use chopsticks or that I can speak Chinese. Or, working on my Chinese.

Foods that I never thought I'd try that I have tried:
-Duck
-Squid
-Squid jerky (I'm not even kidding, it's like beef jerky, but squid)
-Squid crackers (like shrimp crackers)
-Moon cake (the weird thing being that it has a boiled egg yoke in the middle)
-Sashimi
-Sushi
-Entire shrimps (with their faces still on, you have to break it behind the head and on top of the stomach, otherwise all it's guts come squirting out at you, I know this from experience)
-Wasabi
-Candied beef (also not kidding, apparently it's a delicacy here)
-Octopus
-Octopus puffs (they told me they were cookies. Wrong, wrong, wrong)
-Cupcakes... for breakfast. Also on the breakfast menu is cake, Moon cake, hamburgers and meat.

Another thing: (last one, I promise) you can't trust the break here. If it's thin, then yeah, knock yourself out, but if it's round, watch out. There's probably something in the middle which can range from meat to custard to this weird sweetish purple goo to mushrooms. The custard ones are good, and the meat ones if you're expecting meat. But the purple stuff looks kind of unappetizing, so if I bite into bread and find that in the middle, I tend to leave it alone.