Construction

The most interesting part of today was the food. Chopsticks are used with every meal, though this isn't as crazy as it sounds. Everything is designed to be eaten with chopsticks. If it is rice, it sticks together. If it is noodles, they stick together. Almost everything else is either in chunks, or in a sort of a pancake shape, which is cut up into chunks. For breakfast I had a couple more of the bread omlette dishes I had yesterday. They were cut up into little squares, and again were delicious. For lunch we had a feast. Jerry picked out a couple small buckets of food, one of a kind of breaded sweet potato fries, the other of little globs of veggies, tofu, and maybe flour. I saw a shrimp pancake (basically it was many small shrimp, somehow cemented together into a flat semi-rectangular shape), and so we got that too. Jerry and I sat down, and they quickly brought food. However, I think his co-workers must have kept ordering, because they kept bringing food. In addition to the shrimp pancake, the sweet potatoes, and the tofu globs, they also brought a rice and peanut dish, a huge bowl of soup, and a plate of fried veggies.

The shrimp pancake was excellent. It was crunchy but not too crunchy, and basically just tasted like shrimp. I think the sweet potatoes were my favorite dish. They were pretty straightforward, just lightly salted sweet potato fries. The rice was cooked and served in stalks of bamboo about 2 inches in diameter, and about 6-8 inches long. I think to cook it they filled the stalk part way with the rice and peanuts, then put a cap of aluminum foil over the top, then boiled the whole container. To serve it they cut four slices into the bamboo, so that you could peel the woody part off. They inner paper-like layer of bamboo was left around the rice, helping it all stick together. I think it would have been better with a little salt, but they don't serve it on the tables, and I didn't know where to find any. They veggies, soup, and tofu globs were all pretty self explanatory, and not surprisingly, delicious.

While we weren't eating we continued work on the wall. I didn't usually have anything to do so I talked this Chinese man for a while. He was originally from Taiwan, though for the last decade he had been working in mainland China at a factory. The factory had recently closed, and he had come up to the job site to see if he might want to work for Entreprises. He used a strange sort of Chinglish, interspersing one or two English words into a Chinese sentence. I think he was doing it to make things easier on the foreigner, but it was just a lot more confusing. Anyways, I talked to him for a while, then took a nap, then helped a bit, and pretty soon it was time to go back to Taipei. I went to bed early because I wanted to be ready for my placement tests in the morning.