Day 18-hotpot /Day 19- Juifen

On Saturday (Day 18) I stayed around home, but I had a fabulous dinner! The type of meal I had is called hotpot, here is a picture. The big metal bowl of soup is set on a stove built into the table. You add different vegetables and meats to the soup to cook them right at your seat, and then take them out and dip them into whatever sauce you like. The purple thing in the picture is a purple sweet potato, and the red/green thing is a tomato. The light brown thing on the right is light and fluffy fried tofu, and the stuff on the left I think are various meatballs and the black thing is a clam. The thin lines with a cap are straw mushrooms. Most people also eat thinly sliced pieces of meat with hotpot, which I didn't take a picture of. Since the meat is just scorched really fast and thinly sliced, it comes out really tender and tasty.

The next day, Day 19, I went to Juifen with two of my distant cousins and their friend. It was nice to be around people my own age, and Juifen has amazing scenery because it has tall green mountains right next to the ocean. Here is a picture of the awesome view.

Jui means 'nine' and fen means portions. So Juifen means 'nine portions,' I have no idea why. We walked on a narrow pedestrian street filled with shops and food stands. My cousin went to college around the area, so she knew all of the right things to do. The first thing we did was eat, of course. The first thing we ate was this black sausage which is made from octopus. Creepy looking, isn't it?

Next we ate snail (I know this picture is gross looking because it is half eaten, but it was so delicious),

taro and sweet potato coated in sticky sweet maltose and sesame seeds,

and an assortment of meatballs.

The restaurant with the meatballs is famous for having delicious meatballs, so this bowl of soup was really expensive: NT$60. That is US$2, which is pretty cheap in the US but really expensive in Taiwan. Shirt and shoes regularly go for about NT$100, which is about US$3. The meatball restaurant had pictures of the owner, who is a 70-something woman all over the walls. She must be very vain, because all of the pictures were glamour shots or pictures of her in different places of with famous people. There must have been at least one hundred pictures of her in the restaurant, if not more. There were also a couple dogs roaming around the restaurant, one which I felt really bad for. Here is a picture of the dog. It is actually a chihuahua, but doesn't look like one because it is so fat. And it is a male dog, so pregnancy is not likely. There was a normal-sized chihuahua in the restaurant as well which was about half the size of this poor fat one, which eventually woke up and teetered over to beg a customer for food.

Next we walked to the end of the street which was at the peak of the mountain and ate Juifen's most famous food. It is shaved ice with red and green beans and chewy bits made from taro and sweet potato.

After eating all this, we still were not done stuffing ourselves. Next we stopped at a teahouse, wehre we had to take off our shoes and wear slippers, which made me really uncomfortable because I am always scared the previous wearer had athlete's foot. But the view from the restaurant was pretty nice.

I had a rose milk tea, which I thought wouldn't have caffeine but I was wrong. It is also weird to drink flowers, next time I see something that is flower-flavored I will stay away, it is too strange. It is the one in the closest teapot.

We stayed at the teahouse for a while, and then headed off to different spots with great views that my cousin Jean knew about. The first place was a gold-colored waterfall. The rocks in the waterfall are all gold-colored due to arsenic in the water which is naturally found in the mountain. The sign that warned people not to go in the water was in Chinese, so I was really glad my cousins warned me or else I would have just jumped in. Still, it was really hot outside and the water looked so clear, we were so tempted to go in the water! Another place we drove to in the mountains was an abandoned mine from the time of the Japanese occupation. To get there, we had to drive up a winding road which made us all want to throw up and die. I don't know what they were mining, but the smoke from the mines was pumped out to the top of the mountain using the black tunnels behind me in the picture.

Lastly we went to a night market in Keelung, which was packed with people and full of delicious food. To go to night markets, you have to not be afraid of crowds. A lot of the time is spent swimming through lots and lots of Taiwanese people.

Here is one of the things we ate, oily rice and thick crab soup! Yum. :)