Expedition!

It was a foggy night when Naveen, Anand, PC and I left office at Taiwan. PC decided to remain contended with the drinks. The rest of us went into a vast food court in the next building to have our dinner. Without a second thought, we moved into "Indian food palace", where the guy showed us his watch and said, its 10 mins past the closing time. We looked around the food court only to realize the fact that everyone has closed down. Do you know what time it was then? 9:10PM!!! Yes, Taiwan closes down by 9PM, except the night markets! We have already had an awful experience at the night market one day. With a hope to find a few good souvenirs or some petty stuff that would help us reminisce Taiwan, we walked into a night market on a rainy day. We probably chose the wrong night market. It was filled with food stalls, which were all competing in emanating the aroma of the local food. The fragrance reminded us of some sewage in India!

Tired and hungry, we started looking around with a wild hope to find any open food palace. After walking over kilometer and a half, we found a pizza hut which was open. We rushed in, placed our order and sat there, calculating the length of each minute. We finally got our order in about 40 minutes. We gulped the pizzas and walked back to the hotel.

People at Taiwan are really very hospitable. But, it would have been a good place to hang around, if only they all knew english! It takes energy equivalent to a meal, to explain the people what you want for your meal! I expect Taiwan to be good at Chinese food.. Fried rice is a common dish at any chinese place. Alas, that was just my assumption! or a common misconception.. It took us about 10 minutes to explain a lady at a stall in a food court that we were asking her for egg fried rice. We had to show her the photo of an egg, rice and enact the frying act before her to make her understand what we were looking for. That was not all.. May be we weren' t really good at mime or acting.. There was a girl around who knew english. She did the honours of translating. We were really glad to see that she made it exactly how we wanted!

It was an experience in itself, to hunt for what we want. We have to hunt and explore for it because what they have is something that we surely wont like to have, especially for a vegetarian. Once we figure it out, we used to spend the rest of the time trying to explain the customizations to the cook and wait with the fingers crossed till we see the outcome.!