Fruit, Fruit, Fruit!

Thursday our whole group went to Danshui. It is a town along the Danshui river that leads to the Northern Coast of Taiwan. It was so beautiful! We had such a great time! Along the river are a bunch of little shops (which had many different types of jewelry, clothes, souvenirs, and toys)and games to play. There was also a lot of people on the walkways that were playing instruments and ready to draw your picture! It was such a wonderful place to spend the evening and have dinner. The weather was perfect, it was finally cool enough to wear jeans! The sky was beautiful when the sun was setting. Our group met up with a guy who works on campus named Clark. He can speak English really well so it was nice to have his company. He was so interested in sororities and fraternities. He said that the had heard the words before, but knew nothing about it. He thought that it was the neatest thing when I told him that there was a lot of secret things that I was not able to tell him! Especially that we have secret handshakes! haha! It was kind of funny. He was so full of questions about everything! We all went to a restaurant that served their food family style. It was so neat. It was more traditional Taiwanese so there were a bunch of new things to try!

Friday was a great day off. Carly, Dee, Hayley and I walked to a little grocery store nearby to kind of look around and get whatever we say that was interesting. We spent a lot of the day reading and talking. It was nice.

Saturday we planned to help Dee get to the airport to pick up her mom who was coming here for business (and to hang out with us!) She will be here a little more than a week! We took the long loop to the airport stop on the MRT (subway) and stopped by our new friend Abby's work (Starbucks). We felt so accomplished on getting somewhere without a teacher or Chinese speaker! It was fun and ended up being very easy to follow the directions to get there! Abby (pronounced with a strong A) showed us a nice little Japanese style restaurant to eat at and we all went on her dinner break. It was fun. Then we were off to the airport. After we split with Dee we got off the MRT at Ximen station to walk around the mall area since we had time to kill. We found a small craft fair and the stuff was so much fun to look at! I bought 2 pairs of earrings and 2 rings. They are so much fun, one pair of my earrings is a set of Chinese characters that means cool, and the others are mismatching (which is very popular here) and one of them is a character for wine, and the other is zebra print. I was so excited to have some jewelry that could not be replicated and would really remind me of being in Taiwan! The vendors here were so nice and a couple of them spoke English and were so excited when I would use my Chinese to talk to them!

Sunday we ventured not to far away to a little neighborhood that had a couple of fruit stands. It was a lot of fun to look at all of the different fruit that Taiwan has. I always forget that Taiwan is considered a tropical island, but when I see the fruit you have to know that it is. There were piles of coconuts (one that we got the "milk" from - but I didn't like it much... it was more like water with a hint of coconut... almost like someone slipped something into your drink :( ...)





DragonFruit

Durian

Dragon's Eye Fruit

Pineapple







Passionfruit

Lien-oo I don't know the English name but they are yummy!

Coconuts

Buddha Heads

We also stopped into a pet shop that was in a mall there. They had a baby pig for sell, which is pretty common here turns out. It was the most adorable thing ever. I wish that I could have one. This type was not supposed to get very big either!

When we got home we tried the infamous stinky fruit durian. It is supposed to have such an awful smell that it is not allowed on a lot of buses, in a lot of buildings, and is strictly prohibited from airports and planes. Some say that is smells like dirty diapers and rotting flesh. But people eat it. We found it at the little fruit market and figured that we would try it (you only live once right?). It turned out to not be as bad as we thought, I think that I might even choose another bite of that over stinky tofu, (cause that tastes and smells a lot like goat butt!) I didn't even think that it tasted that bad, kind of like a banana pepper pudding. But the smell was yucky. We each took one bite then tossed it!