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