Accompany Me On My Journeys

Taipei Airport
Very fancy, modeled like a 5-star hotel. Pre-paid mobile phone cards available and so are foreign exchange transactions performed. Maps, museum brochures, tourist information and important numbers also available. Pay-phones all over are money-sucking machines. Express bus, U-bus, High Speed Railway bus all available at the air-port. Also a special counter for tourists. 
My reaction: I am so going to love Taiwan!


Enter Taichung 
Mango and me finally meet the AIESEC-ers! We get a warm welcome from them and part ways.


Food
Their eating habits are way different from mine. They start with dessert, then eat their main course and then soup! So, its just the opposite fashion of what I am used too. I was only too happy to eat dessert first! Also they eat their meals much earlier then us, I am guessing that is because the sun rises at almost 5a.m. here.
So they eat their lunch at 12.30p.m. and dinner around 6.30 p.m. The food on the whole is extremely healthy and very tasty. They hardly use any "masalas" but everything has a distinctive flavour and aroma. I have been eating whatever vegetable and sea food put on my plate. Bamboo, tofu, rice, soup, fish/sea-food, meat is the staple meal for the well to do. And almost every second person seems to be well-to-do. That explains their high crime rate.


They love their tea. Herb tea or bubble tea they are sipping on it all the time. Thats also a post dinner ritual for them, considering they eat so early! I finally tasted hēi zhēnzhū nǎichá  thanks to Vicky- translated as black pearl milk tea, it is so yummy and soo addictive and apparently very fattening. More on "bubble tea" here.


Lots of posts coming up. Stay tuned.