First Day in Taipei

Today was our first full day in Taiwan. We walked around Taipei for a while in the early afternoon to get some exercise after sitting on a plane for the entire previous day. Later, we drove north of the City of Taipei to Xinbei County. First we stopped at the National Taiwan University of the Arts.

The school sits on the side of a mountain so the campus is much hillier than back at Ohio State. Being an art school there were some pretty cool statues scattered around. Also, there was a water buffalo grazing in one of the courtyards. Yeah, not sure about how to explain that.

After this, we headed over to Danshui which is an area around the Danshuei River near where it opens up to the ocean. The area is pretty and full of restaurants and such to attract visitors.

We ate at a Japanese-style restaurant where you barbeque your own food on a little grill right at the table. For up to two hours the waitress will bring you unlimited amounts of food to cook. They bring you all kinds of different foods: chicken, beef, pork, several kinds of fish, lamb, bacon, green peppers, onions, and blood cake, which is rice formed with blood. The blood cake is often hailed as Taiwan’s weirdest food. I tried some, and it didn’t taste too bad, but all the same, knowing what it was made it hard for me to eat more than a bit or two. I was most surprised by how good the fish tasted. It didn’t have a ‘fishy’ taste at all. I also really enjoyed the lamb which tasted similar to the beef but a little drier. 

The best part about the meal was that even though we ate a lot of food (we only lasted one hour instead of two) I didn’t feel ‘stuffed’ the way you do after eating at most restaurants back home. Our dinner had very few, if any, carbs so it was a filling, yet healthy and light meal. It’s also a lot of fun to grill your own food. At this point it was dark so we walked around and took some pretty pictures of the area at night before heading home.

As we were walking back to the car we passed by this:

Which Dandrich told me is something like a campaign headquarters for a Taiwanese politician. In Taiwan there are two parties nicknamed the green party and the blue party. The major difference in policies stems from the relationship with China. The green party favors full independence and autonomy from China while the blue party favors unification with China on Taiwan’s terms. I am not sure who the person is or even what party it is for but I thought it was interesting all the same.