Picture Post #2 - Stinky Tofu is REALLY stinky sometimes

Sunday July 26, 2009
I'm back! And you know, I wish I'd taken pictures of the vegetarian meal everyone had at Fo Guan Shan Temple. It was some of the best food I'd had. There were two soups; one was sweet and had cauliflower and a bunch of other veggies and some vegetable that looked like crab but probably wasn't. The other soup wasn't sweet but maybe more tangy and I can't remember what it had in it. Noodles or rice or something. It was good too though. There were apples for dessert and a bunch of other really good stuff. I think there was corn in one of the dishes. This is why I wish I had taken pictures though--I can't remember what what was there to eat now. But if I could cook vegetarian meals like the people at the temple I would become a vegetarian in no time flat. It really was that good.

I went to the night market in Kaohsiung in the second week. It was huge. There were people on top of people. Well, right beside each other anyway. You have to push through or else people will just keep going in front of you (which is what happened to me). My friend Tina told me that I'm too polite and she's right. But it was okay. We got separated a few times (mostly because I was leading) but we always found each other. We ate at a good place and got a mixed dish of meat (this was before I'd had the super awesome veggie meal) with gravy and noodles. I took a picture of it and the flash went off, which startled my friends and a few people nearby. I was using the 'Indoor Sports' setting on my camera which always flashes so I switched it to 'Food', which doesn't flash and takes really clear pictures.

It was good and very steaming hot when I got it. My friends all got the same thing. It was crowded in the eating area too and really cramped (not a good combination). I got at least two drinks in the night market because it was so hot--they were watermelon smoothies and they were really good. I like watermelon now in cubes but the smoothies didn't have seeds but tasted just like watermelon which was a plus.

I had stinky tofu for the first time at the night market. This batch wasn't so stinky, and its taste was alright, mostly bland, so there was some hot sauce looking stuff with it (which I didn't use--I'd already set my mouth on fire once and didn't want to do it again). I had stinky tofu on the weekend of my homestay when my host family and me went out to sightsee. We went to a restaurant and got stinky tofu and it really did smell stinky...it smelled a little like...well, it smelled kind of like sewage. So I guess that's why it's called what it is. I only ate one piece that time. I was walking down the hall in the dorms last night while doing my laundry and smelled the exact same smell and was glad I had something just cleaned to sniff at. I also had another first--I drank coconut milk for the first time. I had the same host family as another American student, Annie, and so she and I hung out over the weekend. We got coconuts that time and the lady who gave us them put a hole in the coconuts and we got sprayed with juice.

Xue Lan's (she helps with the program) parents were our host parents. Xue Lan has a brother and she told us he was shy. He seemed nice but we only got to stay a weekend and didn't really have an opportunity to get to know him better. But they were all very kind and Xue Lan's mother wanted to make sure we weren't hungry. She told us that if a mother's kids go hungry it's the mother's fault, I think even if they're grown up. Or that was just how Xue Lan's mother was. Xue Lan told Annie and me that her mom still treated her like a kid. Xue Lan really helped me when I was there--I was sick then and she gave me Chinese herbs to help my throat. It was powdery and tasted bad but I think it helped a little. The food we ate at Xue Lan's parents' house was traditional Hakka food (they live in a Hakka village).

This is the last picture until the next Picture Post. It's another lunchbox I ordered at school. It was salmon with some kind of glaze and the yellow thing in the picture is lotus root. It was a slight mouth pucker kind of sweet. I only ate a few of them. The black thing to the right of the lotus root was a mushroom, and the other black thing above the mushroom was a pickled plum which was really sour so I didn't eat it all. Some people pickle their own plums (in Japanese they're umeboshi but I don't know what it's called here) and those are super sour so I've heard. There was a miniature omelet with my lunchbox that time and it was good. I ate almost everything. Except all of the broccoli. It was a forest of broccoli...I couldn't finish it.

Well, that's all for now. I'll put another post up later. Bye!