I was in Taiwan with my parents, being given a tour by a family friend. The friend was dressed rather oddly, wearing a strange set of goggles in addition to her dress. These goggles obscured her age, making her appear quite young although I knew she was at least as old as my parents. She had her hair arranged in a single braid.
At one point we were taking a boat tour; Taiwan was largely covered by water, and many people actually lived in the water. This was apparently one of the reasons that the family friend wore goggles. There wasn't enough room in the boat for all of us and so I had been given a floatation device and was hanging onto the back. The boat was moving pretty slowly, if at all, and sometimes I'd swim around beside it. The water was very clear and there were quite a few other people in the water, although they were pretty far away from our boat. They looked well-outfitted to stay in the water.
We stopped to eat a rather exotic meal, served in various wire-frame containers. It start off with some delicious but relatively familiar Asian food. After that, however, we were served a strange dish of green shrimp and an odd plant or animal which looked like a long, narrow slab of meat covered with sheets of seaweed. The shrimp weren't too bad, but I couldn't stand the other piece of food. My parents told me to politely put it back in my dish.
Next we went to visit a casino. I was pretty confused by this at first, as they used cookies as bargaining chips and such. We went up to a counter and had to point to the numbers that we wanted to bet on.
Here I learned that the government of Taiwan wanted to make the nation the world's largest producer of some sort of natural crop, and that various groups were suffering as a result of this effort.
Posted by Trevor Savage at November 2, 2006 3:36 PM | TrackBack