Unexpected Firsts

Here's something probably none of you know about me. Meg didn't. I've never drunk a glass of soy milk. Yes, we always have soy milk in the fridge, and yes, I've eaten plenty of things cooked with soy milk, but truth be told, I was always scared to just drink it. I thought it would taste wierd.

So this morning Barbara took us out for a fairly traditional Taiwanese breakfast. It was a little hole-in-the-wall place with piles of foods to choose from, and vats of warm soymilk. They had chilled soymilk too, in paper cups labeled "coffee" in English. I was thirsty, so warm, sweetened soy milk it was. The picture shows a bucket of steaming soymilk - probably 3 gallons. They served the milk to us in a wide bowl. We were given flimsy plastic wide spoons to drink it with. And after all that worry, it was fine. Maybe not my favorite drink in the world, but not scary at all! Meg said this soy milk had a much stronger soy taste than the stuff we get at home.

For the rest of breakfast, we had fried turnip cakes (OK), a frybread with green onions (yummy), steamed buns with vegis and skinny noodles (pretty good), and sesame buns with filling (yummy).

After breakfast, we ventured forth to explore an older, downtown neighborhood. We visited a Buddist temple, wandered along narrow alleys with all sorts of things for sale, watched a lovely fountain for awhile, and stopped in a night market for a fruit smoothy.

My second "first" was seeing live birds for sale in the night market. I know, it's possible to buy live birds right there back in Minneapolis, but I've never seen them or done it. So I was startled to see cages below a display of fresh chicken parts. I looked down to see beautiful chickens of all sorts of colors. It's not really out of character - we saw live seafood of all sorts for sale, and some live snakes as well. But the chickens were more dramatic to me.

Our feet started to hurt, so we headed back on the metro, stopping to see the 822 Peace Park and the Chang Kai Shek monument on the way.