In the Middle of Taiwan: Ben's Taitung Recap

[Here's a report from Ben. He expressed things so nicely in an email, I just copied and pasted the whole thing :) I'll just add photos at the end and call this entry done!]

This past week we took a trip to the east coast of Taiwan to a Town called, Taitung, which, being translated means, Eastern Taiwan. I love how descriptive the chinese is! You never have to guess where you are in the island since you have towns named Taipei (northern Taiwan), Taichung (central taiwan), Tainan (southern Taiwan). The east coast has a higher density of aboriginal people, and it’s interesting to see how many christian churches there are on that side of the island as compared to the western side. Anyway the reason for our visit was originally scheduled for a triathlon in which I was going to participate relay-style, meaning I was going to do the bicycle portion of the race. Unfortunately, I sprained my left knee while doing a run about three weeks ago, and the doctor said no running or biking for at least 6 weeks and 3 weeks respectively while my knee healed—even if it started feeling better. That said, we planned to take a long weekend to travel over there and see that part of the island.

We went with some friends who are also expats for Micron, and their kids are similar in age to ours. We also went with another friend who speaks chinese and he was actually doing the swim portion of the triathlon, and another lady from church who live in the apt above the chinese speaker. It was a lot of fun and BOY was it gorgeous. Have you ever traveled the oregon coast on why 101? I’d compare the coastline with the oregon coast as far as greenery and rocky shores. Basically substitute tropical florae for evergreens and you have eastern Taiwan. It rained a lot, but we had periods where the sun cam out and the scenery was breathtaking as the clouds hung in the middle of the mountains. Imagine going from sea level to 10,000 ft—the mountains are spectacular. We drove the course I was supposed to ride on a bicycle, and it made me wish I was on a bike instead. We took time to visit a natural preserve where Taiwanese monkeys live and play. The kids were super excited to get up close and personal, but we had to remind them to keep their distance because they are still wild animals. We ignorantly left our car door open and one of those little bandits made off with some of our fresh fruit. Next thing we knew, we were surrounded by these monkeys, and it was a little unnerving. At one point there were two males and one started to dominate the other. I was grateful they weren't mating since that conversation would have been much harder to have with children, but explaining dominance was pretty harmless. :-)

The next day we went to the city of Kending in the very southern tip of Taiwan. The wind was pretty strong, so it wasn’t as enjoyable as it would have been otherwise, and it actually got a little chilly—I had convinced Angela that we didn’t need jackets because it was going to be 78 degrees and high humidity. The latter two were right, but the wind was pretty fierce—at least 20-30 mph gusts with 15-20mph sustained winds. We walked through the night market to get some food and settled on a green papaya salad with hot peppers, garlic and lemon juice. I liked it so much I bought a second salad. We rented rooms at a bed and breakfast each night. From what I understand the B&B’s are much better than hotels and cheaper in most cases. The first night the B&D was really nice, and all the women and girls stayed there while the men stayed in a hotel room closer to the city. The second night we stayed in these little cabins right next to each other and again split up the men and women since it was cheaper to have two rooms and accommodate the other two friends. We went to the port, and I was super excited to get some fresh sashimi. We were told that going in the afternoon for lunch would be the best time to go since they would be serving the catch from that morning and I wanted some super fresh sashimi. I’m not sure what was going on culturally, but it was an interesting experience to say the least. Basically there was a long corridor with “restaurants” lining both sides of the corridor. Each restaurant was serving something fish related from squid, to fried flying fish, to sashimi. These restaurants were tiny and only had 3-4 tables in each with probably a maximum of 15-20 people. The corridor was also packed and was shoulder to shoulder traffic as we pushed our way through trying to find a place to grab some sushi. We started asking the sushi places if they served take out and each told us emphatically that was not a service they provided. Weird. When we asked why, one lady got super upset and told us to quit wasting her time during the busiest part of the day. I was baffled. Your restaurant is full and you have some people who are willing to pay you money to take your fish w/o sitting down in your restaurant. Seemed like an opportunity to make more money, but they lady and everyone else treated us with contempt and disdain when we suggested take out. Anyway, we finally got to sit down in a restaurant and ordered the cheapest yet most delicious and freshest sushi I’ve ever had. About 40 pieces of sashimi for just over $10 USD!!!! It was so good I couldn’t help but wolf down those succulent morsels of fresh fish, and that’s when the second strange thing happened. One of the servers of the restaurant told us we needed to hurry up so other customers could sit down! I was flabbergasted! Seriously? How fast do you need us to eat this stuff? I’m already packing this sushi into my stomach as if I didn’t expect to eat for another month and she’s harassing me to hurry up? I told Jesse, the chinese speaker, to let her know this was the exact reason why take out would have been good for all of us. Asian customer service is markedly different from the US concept of customer service. It’s not upsetting, but definitely a cultural experience you have to remind yourself as you realize that the customer/service provider relationship is actually backwards from what you’re used to.

Then we started the long drive home. Jesse’s little boy, Thomas has a really weak stomach and he barfed in the car a total of three times during the trip. Once on the way to and twice on the way from. Mix that in with incessant potty breaks and we didn’t get home until 10pm. Arghhh!! That’s when you have to remind yourself that these vacations are for the kids and that you won’t actually have another real vacation until the kids are out of the house. We stopped along the route to collect some fresh mangoes from a kiosk along the side of the road. Mangoes are just coming back into season, and they are pretty expensive right now (about $2.50 each), but they are amazingly good. There is one variety, I don’t know the english name, but they call it aiwen and it is the sweetest mango you’ll ever have. Not only that, the good news is these things are just beginning to some in season and they will only get better! The hills are covered in mango orchards and there are little baggies that are carefully placed on every single mango in the orchard to keep the bugs and birds from eating the mangoes. I find myself salivating right now as i think about these things. Angela actually fed one to Theo today, and I had to remind her that little kids don’t deserve fruit that expensive. It’s like giving filet minion to little kids. there’s a reason man invented hot dogs and hamburgers and that was because he didn’t want to share his prime steak and cuts of beef with his kids. Give them a banana and some grapes and they’ll be happy. in the meantime you can enjoy the greatest of God’s gifts to mankind…a fresh, ripe, sweet, juicy mango.

We found the coolest tree at Taitung's Children's Story Museum and park. Its roots seem to grow above ground making this giant tree look like it's floating.

Here's our Taitung B&B: The Dulan Red House (best breakfast I've ever had in Taiwan!)

Near by was a black-sand beach that we had almost all to ourselves for a few hours of wave jumping and sand digging.

Too much exfoliating rubbing from Theo

It made the mud monster mad...

...hilarious to watch Theo try to get out of his way!

You can almost see the mountains through the clouds in the background.

So must mist in this jungle land!

So much for picnic place plan A

Watch for monkey crossing

At picnic site plan B, it felt like we were the monkeys being observed from a safe distance (bus loads of Chinese tourists were fascinated to see such a gaggle of foreigners)