A little bit of DaJia madness

Last weekend (29th and 30th of March) there was a festival of some sort in DaJia. We thought it was the buildup to the Mazu Festival, where Mazu, the Chinese goddess of the sea, takes worshipers on an annual pilgrimage to the south of the island. We woke up to loud music and more fireworks than usual and when we looked out the window, this is what we saw.

Pimped up rides downstairs

I know what you did last summer! You pimped your ride!

Interesting

Hellraiser. Note the Momo shop in the background!!

Talking about Momo, it is a toiletries/pharmacy store which is about 40m from us as the crow flies. We live above it and they play the most annoying song over and over and over again!! It's about 30s long and they seem to have it on repeat! I found myself humming it in one if my classes.

Other than the captain South Africa on the car...what the!!?

This is usually the street leading past the temple

I think this is one of Mazu's general friends, they were demons she defeated

The other general/demon

Dancing and fireworks are the order of the day!

So it turns out that this didn't have much to do with the Mazu festival. They just had some puppet shows and other performances on the week before the festival. I wish I could read Chinese, because a lot of information is missing and it's not always possible to ask someone.

And even then, when you ask a Chinese speaking teacher, you aren't sure if you got the correct answer or if they understood your question. Very frustrating! 

Renalda and I will start Chinese lessons soon, but we are using Anki to learn vocab, both spoken and written at the moment.

Fruit salad and yoghurt. Without a fridge the leftover watermelon went bad :(

Renalda felt my pain regarding something fresh and this is what we made! A fantastic fruit salad with drinking yoghurt. Not quite double cream greek, but it was awesome!

The view from our apartment...not exactly beautiful, but it's home

This is the view of the little town of DaJia from our bedroom window. Not so little really, a lot going on with a small town feel.

Fried naan bread thingy

Interesting pancakes, that reminded us of naan bread, really yummy, with lots of oil!

Too much fried food!! ;)

Supper, fried chicken, fish balls and pancake naan...scrumptious! I promise we do eat veggies!

Can I have some familiar food please!

We watched Treasure Island yesterday and Orlando Bloom's character, Ben is stranded on the island for three years. He has an unnatural desire for cheese! "Cheese is like a piece of heaven!" That's how we feel right now! I want some decent cheese with my omelette, and some real cream in my coffee and what about something fresh and raw?! Don't get me wrong Taiwanese food is fantastic and it IS fresh, but it's not raw. It's not that crispy cool salad with nuts and peppers and crunchy carrots. It's all cooked! 

So what? Make yourself a salad then! Well we don't have a fridge at the moment which means most of the ingredients to make a decent salad will go off! Did I mention double cream greek yoghurt?! So we can't make a salad! 

We tried a Korean restaurant the other day, and I ordered a "salad." It consisted of, onions, spring onions and sweet corn! Renalda had a bibimbap, which was actually pretty awesome, it comes in a thick steel bowl and is still sizzling when they place it in front of you. The rice at the bottom congeals and gets fried into a crispy delicious crust which is a little crunchy and a little chewy, but fabulously tasty. I had serious order envy! I had a few bites ;)

We also had a Korean hotpot at our downstairs food vendor, and tried a 1000 year old egg. The hot pot was something like a moerby stew, with everything under the sun in it. We ordered one with beef, but found pieces of fish, shellfish and other unidentified morsels in it. The egg varied in colour from translucent turquoise to black and grey. It's consistency was a little chewy, runny in places and powdery in others and it tasted like strong blue cheese mixed with stinky egg and is something I won't do again. 

We found out last night that all "barbecue" places aren't barbecues! We quite enjoy the Taiwanese barbecue shops. You get a little basket and choose some meat and veg which is then chopped up and fried or just mixed with some spices. We were walking around town last night when we saw what we thought was a barbecue. The options were the same, the baskets were the same, we just failed to notice the cardboard bowls that everything was served in. We made our selection, and were then asked what kind of noodles we wanted. We selected some, and then were handed a huge bowl of soup and a bag of cooked noodles. All quite delicious, but cooked, and now we know some barbecues are soup places, which is great, because we quite like soup! 

Unfortunately no food photos this time. Tuesday is payday and we have decided we will buy a little piece of heaven to satisfy at least one craving. Matsusei, the expensive, Japanese supermarket in DaJia, does have decent cheese, at a decent price. However we are still living on savings, so we haven't bought any. That will change soon. Cream? Not so much, and definitely no decent yoghurt, if I could find a cheap source of milk I'd make my own for sure, but it seems like dairy is not very important here.