Enjoying the Fruits of the Sea

We decided we had lived on this island long enough without seeing the ocean, so we took our trusty ipad google map app and asked it to take us to Taichung's Fisherman's Wharf for the afternoon. It turns out at the end of the day that we still had not exactly seen the ocean, but at the wharf we were able to fully enjoy the fruits of the sea...first by sight, then by taste--smell was an all encompassing experience.

We wet our appetites with some roasted squid. My microbiologist father would be happy to know that even though it came from a street vendor, we were careful to only buy the one that we watched him slice open, roast and season right in front of us. We were feeling pretty good about this arrangement up until he asked if we'd like it cut. The scissors and metal bowl where that procedure was done called for an extra prayer to ask for a blessing on the food we decided we still were going to eat :)






Julien's favorite parts were the tentacles because they were bumpy.
















Ryley liked it too...

...as did I (believe it or not).











Theo gave it a try but ended up spitting it out--as he does most anything these days, so squid is at least on par with apples, pasta, pickles, and mangoes in his opinion.

Cultural experience: I forgot to take the pokey stick away from him right away, so a very helpful stranger informed me (I can only assume) that my parenting duties were being neglected and took it upon herself (with a concerned yet kind smile) to remove the hazard from his hands. As much as such a moment can kind of chafe, I think I could get used to having extra sets of eyes and hands helping to make sure my boys survive their childhood!

This next series of photos are to document our sea creature feast that we had the adventure of ignorantly ordering, diligently consuming (as best we could), and finally honoring the little restaurant by paying a bill that made the owners' little son (and Ben) get all wide-eyed about. Oh how valuable it will be when we learn our food vocabulary! To order our food, we had about 5 restaurant people gathered around our table at one point trying to help--one of them with a few English words to contribute. While looking at the menu, Ben tried using his nifty iphone app to help decipher some of the characters, I had my ever faithful Chinese phrasebook, but it was slow going and there were too many people eager to help. Finally they just took Ben outside to choose a fish from the tank and offer other suggestions of what could accompany it. Somehow Ben inadvertently managed to communicate that he wanted to take them up on all of their suggestions. The platters kept on coming and coming! I wish I would have had my camera ready at the very beginning though because the best part was when the little boy, with a huge grin, walked up close to our table to show us a huge, flip-flopping fish in his net that he was taking back to the kitchen to have cooked for us!

fresh bamboo with mayo

fried little crusty shrimp things that you eat whole

big shrimp that looked at you as you beheaded them

an entire crab--we really had no idea how to eat this thing--especially with chopsticks?!?

Ryley named this dish fish spaghetti--it had all sorts of sea creature parts in it

Our fried fish...head removed because they must have known that's how Americans like it (what a pity that we choose to miss out on the cheek meat!)

Surprise! The fried fish was only half of it. Some of our fish also was made into a soup...

...and into a dish of sashum

Finally, we could eat no more!

The rest of our time on the wharf was spent just looking, not eating.