New Flavors

So this is what a jungle is like – tropical birds belting out, cicadas buzzing their fierce buzz all around (which I first mistook for some strange and foreign fire alarm), and heat and humidity the likes of a summer day in southern Alabama (so I’m told). What a world away from Fort Collins. Less the desire to shower every 10 minutes, the humidity is a very welcomed change.

A couple of the student organizers for our orientation week here in Hsinchu toured us around our neck of the city yesterday, which followed an intimate tour of the local university. Along this tour, Johnson and Alex (their English names, of course) took us by a serene Buddhist temple along a lily-adorned river…pretty unreal, and all attended by the junglisms mentioned above.

We found a place for lunch where we had outstanding dishes of noodles with shrimp dumplings and sides of pig ear (think fried ham – delicious), “reserve egg” (not so delicious), and some seaweed thing that looked like green tortellini. This cost me the equivalent of $3. We got a bit cocky with a lust for stepping out of our comfort zones during our first venture into the infamous Taiwanese night markets. After warming up with a few tasty chicken treats, the Taiwanese challenged us to a mix of more “local” items, which included chicken hearts, some potato-ey fish thing (we now call these fish fries), pig’s blood cakes, and stinky tofu (this is apparently a traditional Taiwanese dish). The last one tasted exactly as it sounds (and indeed smells – horrific), but the rest were actually really tasty. Success!

 

Breakfast took place in our nice, used-to-be-quiet hotel at 6:30 AM with a bunch of rowdy, off-clocked Americans high on excitement…outstanding. Now off for our first day of orientation activities (Monday morning here). Business-casual in this climate might get interesting.