Food

I feel like I haven't talked much about the food in Taiwan in the past 12 1/2 months, so here’s my attempt to summarize.

Food has been very confusing for me here in Taiwan. It took a long time to figure it out. I'm still a little confused.

It seems to me that in both Hong Kong and Mainland China, on a daily basis, restaurants are places you go with two or more people. You sit. You order a few dishes. You eat. You share them. You're given some hot jasmine tea to drink. It's a social experience.

I've had this kind of eating experience in Taiwan, but it's not a daily experience like it is elsewhere. It seems like in Taiwan the defining characteristic of the food-eating experience is convenience, particularly for lunch. It’s largely take out, take out, take out. Enter, "bien dang," or "lunchboxes." It seems like nearly everyone in Taiwan has one of these for lunch. You go to a restaurant or food stand and they fill it up with whatever you want. They consist of some sort of meat, rice, and some vegetables. They're like a Japanese bento box. I haven't taken a picture of one, so here's one I got from eatingchina.com.
People usually get one of these, jump on a scooter, and go off to wherever they go to eat. It's not uncommon to see people on scooters with like forty or fifty of these babies piled up in a big bag, probably for the whole workplace. They're a staple.

The other main thing people seem to eat besides bien dang is some variation of this:

Noodles. Usually accompanied by a tea egg (which I've grown to love and crave). If you get it to go, they usually put the soup in a plastic bag and give you a plastic spoon, wooden chopsticks, and maybe a cardboard bowl. If you eat it there, you'll probably sit at a long table with some other people, eat your food, then go wherever you're going next.
My (or "our," when Mike was here) first problem here was identifying restaurants. This is probably where being literate comes in handy. What I eventually discovered was that most "restaurants" are I guess what one would describe as "hole-in-the-wall" places (although that term doesn't seem very fitting either). Most don't really have menus. Instead, what is offered is posted on the food stand itself, or a wall, or assumed, with a few tables and plastic chairs nearby. We certainly went to those in China and Hong Kong, and they're great, but they seemed less prevalent. Maybe when I go back to Hong Kong I'll be able to identify and describe the differences more articulately.

These are typical restaurants:


After conquering the problem of identifying good places to eat, the problem became how to get food. Basically, the way to get food when you aren't fluent is to just walk up to one of these tiny places and just start saying something in Chinese. Hopefully the person will just give you something similar to what you asked for. That's what I usually do, and hope the person I'm talking to doesn't ask me for too many details. Sometimes what I get isn't very good, but most of the time it is pretty good. I like watching people put soups together. Throw in some noodles. Pour in a broth or two. Put some green onions on top. Add some spiciness. Throw in a tea egg. For some reason I find it very entertaining to watch. And it's remarkable how popular soup is in the summer. It was probably less popular before air conditioning, I'm sure.
Many places offer free oolong tea, although there's something about it I don't really like. Oolong tea and I seem to have a complex relationship. Sometimes I love it (oolong milk tea = heaven) and sometimes I can't even drink it. Whatever variation is at most of these restaurants, I don't care for, and I miss the jasmine tea you get everywhere in Hong Kong.

However, the TEA STANDS here are the greatest invention on earth. Yeah, I said it...better than the printing press and the polio vaccine and deodorant combined...times 100. You can get eight million different kinds of tea at the stands, they're cheap, they're fast, they're delicious, they're refreshing, and they're insanely convenient (there's one on nearly every block, no joke). I always get "half sugar" because the Taiwanese seem to have a muuuuuch MUUUUUUUUCH MUUUCUUUUUUCH stronger sweet tooth than I and I can't take it. Half sugar is even pushing it a bit. I am a simple girl, I usually just get green tea or oolong milk tea. Sometimes I'll get a fruit juice mixed in or, most recently, "purple rice coconut milk" from Mr. Wish. Very tasty. The U.S. needs tea stands badly. And they need to be just as affordable. I love them so much.
Speaking of a sweet tooth, bakeries here intrigue me. First of all, bakeries are not open early in the morning, but they are open late at night. The bakery down the street is open from 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm. The other thing that intrigues me is how INSAAAANELY sweet the bread here is. I like to say it’s “been dipped in Hello Kitty’s blood.” I thought I was nuts, but in my reading other people's Taiwan blogs, I've realized I'm not crazy. The bread here is really sweet by most Westerners' standards. Even goods that are supposed to be savory are sweet. Mike and I once bought these hot dog things wrapped in some bread that had glazed sugar on top. The only thing I can say about that is: wtf, mate? The sweetness of the breads here is really hard to get over, so I usually just refrain from buying things from the bakeries. Dentists must make a killing in this country!

I'm not sure that I like Taiwanese food as much as I liked the food in Hong Kong and China. Maybe it's because American Chinese food is a variation of Cantonese food. I didn't think I was that influenced by American Chinese food, but maybe I am. I don't know. I'll miss tea eggs and the spicy noodle soup I get at the day market, but I'll especially miss the tea stands. Long live Mr. Wish!