Week 2 Progress Report

Well the week started off rainy windy mess... It was not possible to doing anything without getting sodden legs and feet. So being weekdays the most exciting outings have all centred around food.

Luckily for us Richard (who oddly, for an Aussie, is the only boy in Supply Chain in Taiwan) has a really passion for food, a fantastic sense of humour (sometimes at our expense, but I will get to that in a moment) and the very typical Taiwanese sense of hospitality.

As such Richard has taken it upon himself to make sure that Untung (my colleague from Indonesia), are keep entertained, well feed, and get to experience some of the broad range of food available here in Taipei. Tuesday Richard decided that we should try some traditional 'Chinese medicine soup' I started to realise something was up when the soup arrived and Untung and I had something different from everyone else.

Our soup arrived in a clay pot and when the lid was removed a dark black liquid was revealed with greeny oily blobs on top (see pictures), when investigating the pot with chopsticks chunks of black chicken and large red cubes were discovered, should I tell you now the red stuff was cakes or jelly made out of congealed pigs blood...? No didn't think so! Anyway it was time to face the music, and there have been a number times when my first intact to shy away from new foods, has been proven poor when fantastic new joys were uncovered.However as lifted the first portion to my mouth Richard and the girls got the giggles (never a good sign), however it wasn't as bad as it could have been, kinda tasted like Jaggermister soup heavily laced with soy sauce - mmm yum -NOT! On the upside the salad of young bamboo was amazing and I ate a lot of that!

Yesterday Richard decided to redeem himself, and take us to a traditional Taiwanese restaurant, I cheekily replied that I wasn't eaten anything that he wasn't eating.

The result was another amazing spread fit for a king, it included smoked shark meat (a kind of sashimi served with ginger and wasabi), pork noodles, soup with pork balls, fried oysters, tempura prawns, some fried tofu (yes my appreciation of tofu continues), Chinese spinach and some stir fried snow pea leaves. It was amazing, see the big smile faces of appreciation in the photo's. Well done another great meal, now I have to find some time to get to the gym to start burning this all off!!!

Next step being able to give the taxi drivers some reasonable instruction when I get in their car... We will see if I am still working on this one when I leave (yep it is highly likely).