Happy Halloween!

Its the day of the Halloween, and its a Saturday. Like most weekends, we want to explore our community and the nearby towns. Today we are visiting a small farming town about 30 minutes from our home. It is a very old town with not one single tall building. There is one main street and on it, houses one ancient ice and ice cream store. In Hawaii, they have shaved ice, and in Taiwan, we have just simple ice. The ice is sweetened and you can add any toppings of over a dozen selections such as: tapioca, red or green beans in a paste, jello, fungus, etc etc....

What makes this shop so special is the cooling equipment. It was built over seventy years ago by the Japanese who occupied and ruled Taiwan for fifty years, from 1895 to 1945.

The coils and compressors are visible and they are huge comparing to today's technology. The owner of the shop has to maintain and rebuild on his own since the company who manufactured this outlandish piece of equipment has been long gone. I asked him why he has not switched over to modern refrigeration, and he simply said, people come from all over the world to see his strange looking dinosaur which runs like a charm, and it would be a shame to destroy such good history just for the sake of modernization. He has a good point. His place is jammed packed all day, even on a cooler day in late October. But what is also a nice surprise is that the ice made from this ancient equipment is very different, because it has a very smooth and fine texture to it, unlike the modern crushed ice which is rough and crunchy. I have very sensitive gums and normally when I eat something cold, my gum hurts. Not with this nearly century old ice. It does not have that freezing feeling upon contact with my mouth and gums. Weird.

We had a great time exploring this little quaint town, and look forward visiting others. Everyone is unique, and time stands still in most of them. Its like going back to my childhood when seeing places like this. Old farm equipments, rotary dial phones, phone booths!!! Old barber shops with the leather straps, coffee shops with booths and counters, open air restaurants, night markets, the list goes on........

For dinner, we went back to the organic beef farm. We first went there shortly after we arrived. But because we have been trying so many different restaurants, we have not been able to re-visit many of them. Good thing that eating out here is so reasonable, otherwise we could go broke. I have never tasted beef like this, it literally melts in your mouth and the meat has not been tenderized or processed in any shape or form. Thin strips of almost fat free beef come slightly marinated in a bowl, with a small chuck of beef fat which is used instead of cooking oil, in a pan with a small propane stove. We pan fried it ourselves for about two minutes, and we eat it with steamed rice. We spooned the juice (sauce) from the pan onto the rice and sprinkle some green onions and chopped cayenne pepper, man, it is as close to heaven as we can get........

After dinner, we went home and had our own little halloween party......Taiwanese people do not know and do not care for halloween. We only see a few signs about Halloween in some cafes and a couple of 7 elevens where ex pats hang out. Anyways, this is how we spent halloween, nothing like Canada, but a nice change.....