Turkey Day in Taipei

Well today is turkey day here in Taiwan. Its strange... back home today would have been filled with wine, family, friends and of course a huge turkey dinner. Here in Taiwan it is just another Thursday. It is strange to think that I will be missing almost every major holiday while I am in Taiwan. It is even more strange to be walking the streets of Taiwan and see store after store filled to the brim with christmas goodies. Clearly they don't follow the black friday rule here. So last night I was on my fill my stomach mission again and was looking for some good street food near home. I walked around to a few places asking if they had su shi (veggie dishes) with no luck and then I spotted a local joint that had the characters for tofu on there menu. Those characters were the only thing that i understood out of the tofu dish but I thought what the heck I am going to order it anyway, it was late and I was hungry so I took the plunge. I pointed at the dish and said I want that dofu dish, the shop owner said okay and I waited... and the picture you see to the right was what I got. I had no idea what it was (i mean the green thing, not the tofu) but I was going to eat it. The dish turned out to be very good, I had figured out that the green thing was a pickled egg of some kind. When I got home I looked up the characters in my dictionary and got a little nervous. The pidan dofu (1,000 year egg w/ tofu) was a dish that I was reading about. It is a duck egg that is stored underground for 6 months where it pickles. The yoke becomes a brown/green and the white swells up into a jelly. Now that doesn't sound to bad right? But, traditionally the egg is soaked in bull's urine before it is stored. I liked the dish, really liked it, so I don't think I am going to ponder whether or not I had the "traditional" styled dish or not.

So last night at the hostel I met a three girls who are traveling around the world right now (Madeline, Dana, and Dai) and we decided that we were going to spend turkey day at an American restaurant, not because we could get turkey there, but because it was going to be wonderfully hilarious. We ended up settling on T.G.I. Fridays because the girls had walked past there on Thanksgiving morning and said it looked like fun. We had a few drinks at the hostel during the mid afternoon and off we went. T.G.I. Friday's was to the point of being so bad its good. The wait staff all spoke english and wore winter hats (even though it is 70 degrees out) the music was all straight off of MTV and the food was over priced and Nan Chi (literally means difficult to eat, but implies that it taste really bad).

After our meal it was off to wondering the streets and buying a few beers at a 7-11. While we were walking we found a Karaoke Bar and went in the check the place out. The place was a diamond in the rough. For 300NT (per person) we got all the songs we could want to sing and 3 beers. The American song selection was all older tunes from the 50's and 60's. The people at the Karaoke Bar were wonderful and really made us feel at home. We danced, drank, and sang the night away stopping after every song and yelling GAN BEI (cheers) at the top of our lungs. I tell you the older Taiwanese generation really knows how to party. After that we stopped at McDonalds, which is open 24 hours here, and ate some french fries. All in all it was a wonderful Turkey Day. Today my new found friends are off to the south of Taiwan. Guess its time to meet some more expats.