Yesterday was a very busy day! We woke up about 7 and finalized our presentation for the food science club. Then we met with some students for breakfast. They took us to a restaurant just off campus that served traditional Taiwanese breakfast. We had milk tea, dumplings (potstickers), some sort of rice and raw radish cake, and a thin pancake wrapped around ham (spam) and egg. Everything was delicious! It was also very cheap. We spent the equivalent of about $1.25 each. We then met Marie at the food science building for a presentation and tour of the department. We chatted for a while and then went to lunch at a restaurant off-campus.
You'll start to notice a trend in my posts. Everything revolves around food in Taiwan! We were fed so much food today that by the end of the day it was very difficult to stay polite and keep eating. We noticed that many students did not eat breakfast with us but instead just sat and chatted. When we questioned this, they said that they do not usually eat a morning meal, and when we got to dinner time, we understood much better!
Lunch was a little complicated, because there was only one menu in the entire restaurant that had English descriptions. Without our guides, I'm sure it would have been even more confusing! We met with Emily, the head of the Hotel and Restaurant Management Department, who was very helpful. I ordered a pork hot pot with kimchi soup. I thought that I was familiar with hot pot but looking back I don't think I had ever had it before. It's hard to tell the scale, but these bowls are huge! As you can see I got a bowl of broth on a gas burner and a bowl literally stuffed full of vegetables, mushrooms, tofu in various forms, and a few pieces of seafood, including half of a head of cabbage! I was a little overwhelmed but Emily assured me that she would help me to prepare it. She explained that this is normally a dish that is served family style for special occasions. Preparation of food is continuous as things are deposited into the pot for cooking and eaten once thoroughly heated. The mother in the family is always busy preparing the next set of food and I can see why this is done usually for special occasions! It turned out to be a very interactive lunch and was very instructive as to the Taiwanese food culture.
The Dean of the College of the College of Human Ecology met us part-way through and then joined us for a tour of campus. The College is comprised of Food Science, Nutrition, Textiles, Hotel and Restaurant Management, Graduate Museum studies, and a few others. She has very close ties to Oregon State as her daughter is a student there, and has visited at least six times in the last six years. She was very fun to talk to! The tour of campus was fascinating. There are many student-run stores and restaurants on campus that emphasize the major that they are studying. For example, this shop in the textiles building that sells student-made items and a tea shop that wasn't open yet because it's only the second day of their fall semester! We stopped at a little convenience store on campus, toured a cafeteria, and were gifted with sweetened green tea while we explored.
After the tour we were given presentations by food science students about two various product development products that they had developed. In their junior year students spend two terms developing a product and covering everything from prototyping to marketing strategies. It was really interesting! (Not for the first time did I wish that OSU offered something similar.) Then we gave a presentation about our department and our club to the students, but not without first being fed Boba tea! That lasted until early evening and we had just enough time to go back to our rooms for a few minutes before we were treated to a welcome party hosted by the juniors in the food science club.
There was a TON of food, and they all wanted us to try everything. I wasn't even remotely close to being hungry at that point and was kind of starting to feel overwhelmed by all of it. I politely declined the pork's blood cake (which everyone else tried, so you'll have to ask them how it was) and took a small bag of sweet potato puffs, lemonade and some dumplings. Once I sat down I was brought a tub of soft bean curd served in a sweet caramel sauce that had a similar flavor to the custard that we ate earlier that day. I only had a few bites of everything, but after talking with Vicky, a student in the club, she explained that I wouldn't be rude to not eat everything, something that I was definitely worried about! She also told me that the bean curd normally has clams or pig's intestine in it. You never know what you're going to get!
We were then treated to a talent-show kind of performance by the students, and boy was I surprised when it became apparent that we were part of the entertainment! Games were taught to us and played, music was sung, and Marlin even got up for a little performance! We were told that we'd be expected to show off some of our talents on Friday afternoon but I'm pretty sure that we can't come even close to the troupe spinning lighted ropes along to a Linkin Park song!
The party lasted about 3 hours, and by the time it was over I was exHAUSTed. Jet lag had really set in by that point and the little sleep was catching up with me. We went back to our rooms and tried to have some students fix the internet problems. Only Marlin's laptop seems to be able to connect so I made a brief post and went to bed by 10:30. I woke up at 2:30 and again at 4. I wasn't able to fall back asleep so I decided to write this post before I forgot everything that had happened. It's now about 5:30 and I have just two hours before we're meeting Dr. Bob at the 7-11 on campus for breakfast. It's not as crazy as it sounds. They have many local foods there that are easily microwaved or eaten fresh. Then we're going to be leaving campus for a field trip of a bean curd/ tofu manufacturer and a ready-to-eat rice company. I'm pretty excited about that! That will take most of the day, and then the students are taking us out for karaoke this evening.
That's it for now! I apologize for the lengths of the posts. It's really hard to shorten up such a busy day, and I want to make sure that I don't leave anything out. This trip is already ranking on the top experiences that I've ever had and we've only been here a day! I'm going to be taking my laptop to Dr. Bob's room in the hostel to see if it will work with his ethernet cable. If that works these posts will go up today. If not, well, I'll keep trying! Hope that you are all looking forward to reading them!
Miss you all!
Emily
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