NIGHTLIFE

Taiwanese nightlife is completely different from the European one...
I don't know how the situation is in Taipei or other cities so I will talk to you only about Taichung.
First of all: ALL YOU CAN DRINK FORMULA. Almost all the clubs here (18TC, Muse, Lobby, X-Cube) are all you can drink, which means that you pay the entrance and you can drink for the whole night as much as you want. Clubs are open from Wednesday to Saturday (Some of them open also on Sunday), from 22.30/23 to 4/4.30 and there is a difference of price between men and women; the "standard" price is 100-200 NTD for girls (around 3-6 euros, clubs for girls are really convenient) and 600-700 NTD for boys (around 20 euros). Wednesday is usually "girls'night" and girls enter for free before midnight or pay 100 NTD after midnight, Thursday is "students'night" and if you show your student ID card you can have a discount... Friday and Staturdays all those clubs are always super full! The important thing to remember about all you can drink is that you don't have to lose your glass, never, because they would give you drink only if you have the glass in your hand. You can only choose from some basic drinks such as whisky coke, vodka lime, vodka cranberry, tequila sunrise, sex on the beach... And sometimes the dancers (yes, there are sexy dancers, most of the time girls but sometimes also boys) come close to you with a bottle of vodka and they give you shots.

vodka shots

Muse club

Another thing I noticed is that here they don't really pre-party... Clubs open around 22.30 because I think that Taiwanese people in general don't drink a lot before entering the club, as they have the all you can drink... It's really different because for us in Europe it is the opposite: we meet in someone's house and we drink a lot until 00.30/1, before entering the club, and once inside we usually don't drink anymore because cocktails in clubs are way too expensive!
Also bar are not really common here... In our neighborhood we have just one bar we used to go during the first weeks because they gave us the all you can drink formula for 10/12 euros, but after 2 or 3 times we didn't go anymore because alcohol wasn't alcohol at all and after the second time we went there they didn't want to give us cocktails anymore; there is also a nice bar close to our Universty but also there drinks weren't so good! The atmosphere was really nice, but they didn't know how to prepare cocktails... They gave the wrong name ("sex on the beach" became "sexY on the beach", "screwdriver" became "schooldriver") and sometimes they also put different ingredients (maybe rhum insted of whisky, or things like that).. I really think that drinking is not in their deep culture! Anyway, the most common local drinks are "Taiwan beer" (which can be normal or with different flavours such as honey, mango, pineapple) and "Kaoliang", a strong liquor similar to whisky (I actually think it is disgusting hahahah).

Taiwan beer

But Taiwan means karaoke! for Taiwanes people karaoke is the new club: you meet with your friends in a room (from 5 to 10 people) and you usually have buffet and non-alcoholic drinks included for around 4 hours...and you start singing and laughing!
Other common thing young people do here is going to bowling (we often go too and it is always really crowded) or go the cinema, which are usually multiplex.

SEVEN ELEVEN LIFE

Taiwan is the country with the biggest number of Convenience Stores in the world! 7/11, Family Mart, Ok Mart... A Paradise for everyone!

Convenience Stores are a kind of supermarkets open 24/7 and they usually sell basic goods: food (rice, noodles, soups, sushi rolls, hamburgers, hot-dogs, salads, fruits, ice cream, cookies, jam, yogurt, cakes, bread), drinks (water, tea, milk, coffee, juices, coke, beers and also wine, vodka and other types of liquors), cigarettes, "junk food" (chips, crips, chocolate bars) and goods for house and personal care (tootbrushes, toothpaste, racers, sanitary napkins, some medicine, umbrellas, waterproofs etc.).
Both 7/11 and Family Mart are Japanese but Taiwan has the biggest number of them: in the same street you can find even 3 or 4 (in my street, for example, there are 2 7/11 and 2 Family Mart... All of them within 100-150 meters!).
I love convenience stores because they have everything you need: when you are hungry (at 2 pm or at 4 am) you can take something to eat, after club you can have a reeeeally good hamburger or sushi roll, which is even better ("sushi is yhe new Kebab"), if there is a Typhoon you can come here and take what you need at any time you want (that really happened! During my first week in Taiwan we had a typhoon and no light, no electricity, no water for the whole day so we went to th nearest 7/11 at least to eat something), if you are sick you may find some medicine... or at least someone who may help you or call a doctor.
Another thing I love is that they have a microwave to heat food and a kind of coffee machine to prepare you an American coffee or a Café Latte (breakfast at 7/11 are soooooo common: butter milk bread and hot coffee! Even if it is not the best it's ok, convenience stores are too...convenient!
The last amazing thing is that you can do everything here! Pay your rent, charge your phone with data and calls, withdraw money, buy tickets for the bus, buy tickets for the baseball match, pay your laundry... I will really miss them once back in Italy!

Ps: never lose your 7/11-Family Mart receipts... There is a lottery every two months! And Taiwanese say there is always the possibility to win something... Should we believe or not? #Ialwaysforgettoplay

they really have all of these things... bread with Hello Kitty

weird eggs in a weird sauce I still didn't try...

green machine where you can charge your phone with data

rice, noodles, soups, dumplings...

sushiiiiii

TEA CULTURE

bubble milk tea

Good evening! :) I'm now going to talk about another important topic for Taiwan: TEA

Many of you maybe know the famous bubble tea ("zhēn zhū nǎi chá" in Chinese, which literally means "bubble milk tea") but maybe you don't know that this drink was invented here in Taiwan (in Taichung, the city where I'm actually living hehe) in 1980; it is usually prepared with black tea (hóng chá) or milk tea (nǎi chá) and tapioca balls are added at the end to give more "flavour" to the tea.
This is the most famous but there are maaaaaaany more! There are almost more tea shops than clothes/shoe shops, and there are a lot of brands too! Diagon Alley, Dragon Tea, Woobbee... just to name some of them.
When you order a tea they always ask you if you want it to be hot or cold, how much sugar you want and if you want to add ice or not.

tea in 7/11, convenience store

There are different types of tea: the most basic ones are "black tea", "green tea", "milk tea" and "oolong tea"; we also have "high mountain tea" (made in the mountain of Nantou - north of Taichung - or Alishan, north of Taiwan), "honey tea" and "honey black/milk tea". We can find fruit-flavoured tea like pineapple, passion fruit, dragon fruit, roselle, lemon, orange, than we have "coffee-tea", "alpine green tea", healthy tea with ginseng and "cake-cream tea" (usually with cream, chocolate and oreo, really dietetic).
A typical Taiwanese meal (lunch or dinner) usually consists in fried rice or fried noodles... and tea, a different one every day! They never get tired, really.. they usually put it in a small bag, to keep it cold (or hot) or just to carry it if they are in a hurry, and they drink in class, in the cantine, in the library, in the street... Crazy!


Last month I had a field trip with the University and we went to a tea house where the tea-pickers explained us how to pick the tea leaves and actually make tea; I learnt a lot of things about tea culture, such as the difference between green tea and black tea and how it changes in the different regions of the country, and I used a cloack (to protect myself from mosquitos) and the dǒulì (typical chinese hat) to pick the tea leaves. It was a great experience!

tea picking in Nantou

FOOD

Taiwanese food is considered the best in the world according to CNN. Actually, I don't really agree with this statement but I can recognize some nice things about their "food culture" and gastronomy, whereas some others are really strange.
First of all: most of taiwanese houses (especially those to rent for students) don't have a kitchen. Taiwan is famous for its night markets and street food so people barely cook and they always buy food outside because it's fast and cheap (you can have a normal meal for 2/3 euros).

a typical taiwanese menu

Menu are almost always in Chinese and there are no waiters serving you, unless you are in a fancy restaurant. In a typical/normal taiwanese restaurant/street food restaurant, you take the menu with you with a pen and, close to the name of the dish you want, there is a white box where you have to write the number of dishes you want to order: for example, if you want to have one fried rice with beef and one fried rice with noodles you have to write 1 and 1 in the boxes near the name of the dish. You can write 1, 2, 3 but it is better if you use Chinese chacacters (ex: 1 is -).

I also really like the fact that in most ot the street food restaurant they give you rice/noodles and tea for free. It is so nice! And you always have to serve yourself: you have to find the shelf with chopsticks, spoons, sauces and napkins and you have to take them by your own.

steamed dumplings

As I already said, Taiwan is famous for its night markets. I'm living in Taichung, the third biggest city after Taipei and Kaohsiung, and here there are three big night markets: Donghai (which is the one where my residence is), Yizhong and Feng-Chia, which is the biggest and the most famous. In the night markets you can find everything... but really everything: clothes shops, music shops, shoes shops, tea shops (tea is also really important in taiwanese culture, but I will talk about it later) and of course STREET FOOD!! You can not even imagine how many stands we can find in a night market and there are really a lot of different types of food: fried chicken, octopus meatballs, fried rice and fried noodles, steamed and fried dumplings, korean and japanese food, sweet potatoes and normal potatoes with cheese, chicken feet, pig ears, fried shrimps, oysters, beef cooked at the moment, hot-dogs with rice, omelettes, tofu, sweet&sour soups... . Really typical here in Taiwan is a type of buffet-stand where there is only raw food and you can serve yourself putting the stuff you want (usually chicken, meat, fish dumplings, tofu and different types of vegetables) in a box to give to the "chef" who cooks all those things for you, usually in a soup or with noodles/rice-noodles (depending on your choice).

raw food

And you can't leave Taiwan without trying STINKY TOFU and DUCK BLOOD! Actually they are quite disgusting (you can recognize stinky tofu from its terrible smell), but they are two things you need to try at least once... And what about all the other strange things they eat, like chicken feet, pig ears, snake skin? 

 The last but not the last thing I love about this country (which is actually typical all around Asia) is HOTPOT; this is a kind of soup (usually tomato soup, pumpkin soup, milk and cheese soup), you decide the ingredients and you cook it by yourself. The most common things to add are beef or pork, vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, shrimps, tofu and you can have a ball of rice to eat meanwhile you are waiting for the soup to become hot and cook your food.

hotpot "Nori", the best one <3

Taiwan, country of motorbikes and convenience stores...
 I'm almost at the end of my experience here in Taiwan but I really want to share what I learned about this beautiful and weird country and its culture.
"Ilha Formosa", also known as the heart of Asia: a small island where we can find everthing: big cities, villages, nature, temples and few tourists. When we think about Asia we always think about China, Japan, maybe Korea and Thailand... but not Taiwan. That's why Taiwanese people seem to be really curious when they see a foreigner and always keep looking at him/her, and I think that's also why their English is quite poor (my Chinese is really poor too, so sometimes communication is quite hard). But Taiwanese are really friendly and polite,even if they don't understand what you are trying to say they smile and try to help you, if possible.
I've been living here for almost 4 months (I will stay here until middle February) and I can definitely say that coming here was a shock, but I'm sure that going back to Italy will be much more difficult.
I decide to divide this blog into different parts,in order to explain everything more clearly.