The Taiwanese God of Torture was clearly in a humourous mid-winter mood. He (and it must be a he) made sure the weather was perfect for doing all the things we really wanted to do – like cycling, going to the beach or just chilling out in Taipei – and that we were instead subjected to a series of ridiculous tasks that would cause only to heighten the considerable pulsing pain in our heads.

Round 1: Breakfast / Zao Fan

Precisely what I did not need was precisely what I got. Taiwanese breakfast. I really do consider myself an adventerous eater, but not at breakfast, when all I want is the things I grew up with. What is it? Rice soup with fried offal, a fried egg, some stewed tofu in a spicy MSG sauce and if you are lucky some mechanically seperated pork meat (AKA pork floss, my nemesis).

Don’t mess with the J-Man

Round 2: Strawberry Picking

Miaoli is famous for its Strawberry picking. Now, ordinarily I would be quite excited about this and would be looking forward to running around the local fields targeting enormous juicy red taste bombs in the quest to find the perfect one. What we got instead was a field smaller than the car park meagrely stocked with pale, tasteless fruit in neat, shrink-wrapped rows.

Anke – you seem disappointed in the taste of the strawberries

D&G; Winter 2005 – “Strawberry Chic”

Round 3: Pottery

For the second stage we went around a traditional Taiwanese (read: Japan / Dutch / Spanish) pottery. This really would have been okay, normally, but I really was not in a creative mood and had no temper to mess around. We did get to play with some clay at the end, though, put they gave us newspaper to build on, the newspaper absorbed the water and disintegrated and the newspaper neatly and evenly distributed itself through the clay.

Rough, but laughing through it!

But seriously… we really do enjoy these trips. It is just that us Euros enjoy more complaining about it! These are the times when we often see the true cultural differences, and we are pretty priveleged to be able to catch a ride with it.

The clay is on my head, see…