One thing we all need, everyday, is food. We're supposed to eat three times a day to have a healthy diet and when we don't eat we're hungry, tired and irritable. So, it's pretty important.
Which makes it weird that I wasn't worried about how different the food would be in Taiwan. "Sure, I'll eat anything", I thought to myself. I would regard myself as a pretty good eater at home and I thought I'd just kinda be grand with whatever was available here. I've noticed a common theme about things I thought before I got here - they were all wrong.
It turns out that I AM a picky eater. But so are most foreigners it seems. I mean that in the broadest terms as well; foreigners in every country are picky eaters. I've noticed that everyone just wants food from home. Comfort food is called that for a reason. The people I hang around with are from the U.S. (Tennessee, Colarado and Vermont), England, Canada, Scotland, Sweden and Ireland. Each one of us has a different thing we miss about food and there almost all unique to our own countries.
Growing up with something automatically makes it your favorite food. The other interesting thing is that it's not really gourmet food we're missing, it's the basic stuff from our actual homes that we miss.
The food over here isn't bad but it's so completely different that it's really difficult to get used to it properly. As I said before, we eat our dinner with chopsticks everyday now and I've gotten used to that but your pallet is much harder to change. A certain portion of the food isn't great. It's a lot of different kinds of food basically boiled to within an inch of it's life. To put it bluntly and not sound horrible, it's 'poor man' food for the most part. That sounds terrible but most food started out as 'poor man' food it just seems that it hasn't moved on in some areas over here.
A lot of what we eat is actually amazing though and is definitely the best Asian food I've eaten but I wouldn't want to eat it for the rest of my life. Even though we have a routine of what we eat and it's fairly varied, eating 'foreign' food all the time gets a bit samey after a while.
It's a weird reaction because it kind of feels like we're eating the same stuff all the time but also trying new stuff all the time. It's hard to describe…..
Maybe it's best to use a comparison. Say you loved Indian food and decided that you wanted to eat a different Indian dish everyday for 2 months. You find the best Indian restaurant around and decide to try a new thing off their menu everyday for 2 months. While in theory you are eating something different everyday, it's all Indian food and after a while it'll taste pretty similar. That's almost how it is over here. We are eating different dishes everyday but it's the same style all the time. So it feels both new and old at the same time.
I guess that's the result of having so much choice these days. We don't really eat the same stuff all the time at home anymore and that's probably reflected in my pallet. I wouldn't want to eat 'Irish' food everyday at home so I don't really want to eat 'Taiwanese' food everyday I'm here either.
Food is a big part of the culture here though and there is lots of restaurants and stalls selling food all the time. It's kind of a social thing for the locals I think. You'd see big groups eating together every night of the week and it seems to be the only time they have a few beers. There's no place that's just a bar in Jhunan. The only place we really go for a drink is a German style beer house that mostly sells food.
It's not very nice.
The nightmarket is the social gathering where the locals might bump into friends, like we would in the pub. If anyone has ever been to the Athy market it kind of gives you a picture of what a nightmarket is like. Some are massive and some are pretty small but they mostly have the same stuff. It's usually a big mix of stalls selling various kinds of food, drinks, sweets, clothes, shoes, electronic goods, carpets and then a whole host of carnival games designed to rip you off. We always seem to get drawn in by the games though. There's a big win for one of us around the corner, I can feel it……
The main aspect of these markets is food though. There's usually stalls selling all types of Taiwanese food and some foreign food (usually Indian). The market usually has a big seating area to the side where people can sit down and eat their dinner from the stalls. Most people in the nightmarket will usually have a bag of food in their hand and pick away at it while they look around too. I don't like this type of eating that much. It kinda feels like you're just picking away for the sake of it.
These little bits of food are pretty good though. You can get different types of deep fried chicken, sweet potato fries, normal fries and hash browns all for about 2 euro. They are more of a snack than actual dinner though.
Some of the Taiwanese food that's sold at nightmarkets it pretty gross to be honest. The easiest gross things to mention are chicken feet and stinky tofu. Chicken feet is pretty self explanatory - fried whole chicken feet. They look fowl (see what I did there?). Needless to say, we haven't tried them yet.
The other major staple is stinky tofu. This is basically gone off tofu that has been cooked. I don't know a whole lot about it but I believe it can be cooked in two ways and tastes delicious. It is one of the local's favorite treats and some of our friends here say it is really nice. But, and this is a big but, it smells like a horse's are. A dead horse's arse. I swear to God, the smell as you walk past is overpowering and has made me gag. It literally smells like raw sewage. So, on this basis I have refused to try it but I think I'll have to give it a go before we leave. I'm not looking forward to it.
I told one of my work colleagues that we don't do nightmarkets in Ireland and she just asked "well, what do you do at night then?". It seemed undignified when i just replied "go to the pub". She probably thinks Irish people are mad to just go sit in a place with friends and drink pints. I in turn think she's mad to spend her Saturday night at an outdoor market selling tat and food that smells like poo. It just shows how one country's normality seems completely alien to someone from another.
We basically eat out every night over here. There's a few reasons for this. Number one is that it's actually cheaper to buy takeaway than to buy the raw ingredients and make it yourself. Apparently, this is because people think restaurants should be cheaper because they buy their food in bulk. So they are. Weird, eh?
Reason number two is that we only have one stove in out apartment so it's actually really difficult to make anything worthwhile. Ovens aren't very common over here. We basically end up making the same thing we would have bought from a takeaway but it's more expensive and not as nice.
Reason number three is that we don't finish work until after 9 o'clock at night, so it's mad late by the time we make dinner during the week. Also, going out for dinner is a good way of meeting up with out friends and unwinding after the day of work.
Our limited knowledge of Chinese means that we can order most of the food we want and can recognize some food symbols on menus but we don't know the actual names for a lot of the places we eat in. This means that we have come up with out own names for them amongst the expat community. The names are mostly based on location, colour and the type of food they serve. We wouldn't be winning any marketing awards, put it that way.
Some of the names include: the Birdy Place, the Beef Barn, Teppanyaki, the Red Place on the way to Toufen, the Duck Place, the Thai Place, the Restaurants by Wellcome, the Places by the Train Station, the Stalls, the Vietnamese Place (still haven't tried…), Dumpling Place, the Egg Emporium, Breakfast Place and (my favorite name but no one else's) the Country Castle.
We go to some places more than others and some are more popular amongst the locals than others but there are definitely ones we'll miss when we go. Myself and Katie have a particular fondness for the Birdy Place because we discovered it, plus it is delicious and I think it will be our last meal before we leave. The cool thing about being a foreigner here is that the people who run these places always remember us when we go in so they are always really nice to us and seem really delighted to have us. Some of them even know our names and they all know what we're gonna order!
I suppose standing out from the crowd has to have some perks to go along with the constant staring.
