more about food

confession - we eat out a lot here. and by a lot, i mean... maybe 5 nights a week. i'm pretty sure i'd eat out 7 nights a week if allison let me. not that we can defend going out that much, especially after cooking so much at home, but i'll try. as vegans, the food here is super cheap. actually, most food is cheap, but the vegetables are cheaper. currently, you can get about 33 new taiwanese dollars (NT$) for 1 US$, which helps (i think... not sure how that works). also, our kitchen is really small and narrow and we don't have an oven. ok, i know those were weak points, but the food is reallllly good.

we live really close to three or four restaurants. there is a thai place, with an english menu, near us called thai yun (first one on the page) that has great water spinach, spicy green beans (best ever), fried tofu with garlic piled on top, and some fried cabbage that allison loves. the only thing holding this back from being our "cheers" is that they can't speaking english, so they don't know our name. right next door to that, there is a japanese place (see: stanky tofu experience) with an english speaking waiter who helps us out. this place has silken tofu, which isn't allison's favorite, but quite a few vegetable options. i think the best part about this one is the atmosphere (pictures later). a couple restaurants down, there is a vegetarian dumpling place (that are boiled, not fried). we'll get to the fried goodness in a second) we had our friend's girlfriend (who speaks/reads chinese) translate the whole menu for us, so we're able to order anything we want. 10 dumplings = US$ 1.33, which is crazy. allison usually gets wonton soup with it and we usually end up spending around $5 for dinner and lunch the next day. my favorite thing about this place is the lady/owner/cook there pretends like i can understand chinese. if it isn't charades, then i don't want to play. she likes to speak chinese a million words a minute to me and then repeat a world 10 times, trying to get the point across. accidentally ordered sauteed and boiled water spinach at the same time. she really didn't want me to get it, but i did she was right. i should learn chinese. in addition to those three restaurants, there are about 10 small little street food carts that are along the side of the road within three or blocks both directions of us. i usually go to one owned by a brother and sister that is amazing. all of it is fried, so we try not to eat there too often (but it is so good, so i go too often). they have fried tofu, gelatin fries, sweet potatoes (sprinkled with strawberry-y sugar), rice brats, broccoli, green beans, corn on the cob... yes, fried, and a lot of other meaty items that scare me. i usually have them smother mine in their chili powder stuff and allison opts for a sweet kind of sprinkled stuff. lately, i've brought the brother, who is around my age, a beer and he has a big smile on his face and then gives me a bunch of stuff for free. i've been using google translator on my phone to tell them things and asking questions, but it is pretty funny because they can't reply back to me.

also... about ten minutes away from us, we've been hitting up indian food once a week. we're currently addicted to a place called little india moslem restaurant. they have five or six veg dishes and each one comes with naan and rice. everything tastes great and we usually get some to take for lunch the next day. another place, a little closer to us, is a place called loving hut which is a chain of restaurants throughout the world with pretty cheap set meals. other than that, we're looking forward to trying spring natural vegetarian restaurant in the next couple of weeks. anyone that is reading this in taiwan know if any other good places to go?

since there are no resources for vegan restaurants in taichung (that are in english) i'm going to start a review blog of the places we go to and try to go to a new one each week or month. i'll plan on posting a few pictures of the places i've mentioned here once i get it going. i'll probably get that going this week and will post the link.  hopefully it will kind of look like stumptown vegans food review site, but we all know it won't.

few random pictures.

sign shop in taichung (looks fun, right virgil?)

morning traffic

rest stop sighting on the way to taipei for volleyball

still love our car

(and spending $75 on gas per month instead of $375)

20 eyes, high fives, and two white people (and morakot?)

went out to dinner at a thai place about 2 minutes from us last night. (will post a map of where we are as soon as i figure out where we are). when we walked in, all four of the early 20s wait stuff stopped in their tracks and waited for us to do something. we froze too because we didn't know what to do, and then i smiled and held of two fingers (hoping i wasn't actually flipping them off). they seated us and we had a great meal - spicy green beans, sauteed vegetables, rice, taiwense beer (600 ml!), and some icy mango-y, coconut milky dessert stuff that was great. however, that wasn't all that happened... i definitely picked the wrong seat during the meal because allison was able to eat while making eye contact with all four people on the wait staff and the other six people eating about 73% of the time. i kept asking her if they were still looking and she said "yes" through her cute little smile. of course, i kept turning around to check, and was greeted with smiles. we both decided i definitely need to switch spots with allison next time. we were also able to have four different waiters/waitresses throughout the dinner. i'm guessing they all wanted a chance to say they waited on white people, so we had a different person seat us, take our order, serve our food, and then bring us the bill. it got better when i got up and asked where the bathroom was. after the girl told me where to go and i went in, allison saw her turn to someone with a big smile and say, "restroom!" and give them a big high five. wish i could have seen it! anyways, we ate, paid, i forgot and tried to tip, they didn't want it, and we left. loved it! hopefully they know we'll be going there at least 7 nights a week.

oh, one more thing... typhoooooooooooooon! mr. (or mrs? or ms? help me out megan) morakot is hopefully going to be visiting us tomorrow!!! we probably won't get the big stuff, but we will probably get quite a bit of rain. if we do get hit with it, allison and i will be sure to let you know how it goes. (and no, i won't make any wizard of oz jokes about not being in kansas anymore) if you don't know, we're about in the middle of taiwan on the west side - here is a satellite image of it:

ps i mentioned megan earlier in this blog post. she is THE blonde in taiwan (accept no imitations) and has been over here for almost a year. actually, i don't know how long she has been here exactly, but i'm too lazy to look right now. check her blog out!

pps allison tried to get us kicked out of a sega arcade/video gambling place today. will post video later, but she used our camera to take a video of me losing three dollars and was told to put her camera away. it was a crazy virtual black jack game. i probably would have won if i hadn't gotten flustered.