Taiwan: Kaohsiung Eats

Time to highlight the eats from the second leg of our trip to Taiwan.

The food in Kaohsiung was delicious. As a port city, Kaohsiung has some great seafood. I especially enjoyed the sashimi. It's been awhile since I've had good sashimi (Sorry Motherland, but Korean sashimi is just too slimy).

I also finally mustered up the courage to try stinky tofu. I've been told that stinky tofu may smell like a leaky sewage pipe, but it's actually quite tasty. I will concede that stinky tofu is nowhere as bad as it smells, but I would still say that stinky tofu is an acquired taste. Folks may disagree, but stinky tofu is surprisingly dry, and tastes just as it smells, perhaps a little milder.

Stinky tofu aside, I would say that everything I tried in Kaohsiung was quite delicious. In addition to various seafood dishes (similar to Chinese cuisine), I tried a number of street food and snacks for the very first time. Some of the more memorable eats were:

• Pork Dumpling (Meatball wrapped in rice dough and smothered in a sweet Taiwanese gravy)
  
• Spicy shelled sea bugs (I have no idea what they were, but they were compared to Korean bbeondaegi)
• "Virgin crab" (crab with a mega load of eggs)
• Taiwanese shave ice (In my opinion, it's much more delicious that Korean shave ice. The fruits in Taiwan are so fresh and yummy. We had fresh mango. It was the perfect cure for a blistering summer day on the island).
  
• Taiwanese ice cakes. (A man was selling these near a shrine. It's similar to Korean jujuba, only a little more creamy. It reminded me of the Samurai ice cakes back in Hawaii, only the Taiwanese ice cakes tasted more like actual fruit.)

I have to give major thanks to Ben and Ben's Brother for introducing us to so many good eats. Everything they put in front of us was mighty tasty. The only snack they did not endorse was deep fried ice cream at the night market, and of course, that tasted like crapola. Actually, it tasted more like deep fried chalk. It was the stinky tofu of desserts.

I repeatedly tried to post some pictures to help you visualize some of these eats, but either Blogger or my Internet is being a major jerk, so you'll just have to sit through another one of my videos if you'd like a visual sampling of our Kaohsiung eats.



Kaohsiung Eats from Annalog on Vimeo.

I still have a lot to share from our trip to Taiwan. I'll eventually get around to it, and explain these clips:

Dream Mall from Annalog on Vimeo.