Today was not a day for reminiscing on the MRT and eating sushi. Today I did something new, as I often do here. Today I bought food at a buffet. There are so many buffets here. I'm normally opposed to buffets back home, but here there is an advantage, I can see the food that I want, or that I don't want, otherwise there's a certain element of surprise.
The choice of buffets was easy. I live almost on top of a buffet, technically I live on a food shop next to a food shop next to a buffet, (that's two food shops over) but they are very small and narrow, also, since I'm being so technical, this buffet is the first place I see when I walk out of the downstairs door. Every time I leave the apartment I glance over through the opened back door of the kitchen of this same buffet, the cook at first would look at me, but now she's used to me. And as I turn right, into the alley, I walk along at least 3 or 4 side windows looking at Taiwanese people eating and reading Chinese newspapers as they sit in this Taiwanese buffet. So it's about time I tried it.
I loitered around at the edge of the alley, mentally preparing myself, and as I'm loitering an old man on a bike eyes me as he comes towards me. I think he's going to turn into my alley, he does, so I flatten myself against the alley wall as he passes me, and he parks his bicycle then walks back past me, back onto the sidewalk and into the buffet.
In I go. Going in takes two small steps, or one big one from the sidewalk. To my left is about 20 or so stainless steel bins of food with two shop keepers behind them dishing the food into little paper food trays. The shop keepers are pretty ancient looking, and ancient Taiwanese people usually seem to be under five feet tall for some reason, I don't know but I've heard something about diet has made younger people taller here. One of the ancient shop keepers, a woman, says something to me in accented Chinese that I don't understand at all, maybe it wasn't Chinese, she pointed to a box on my right, then went back to wherever she had been. To my right is a stack of trays, and a stack of boxes with flaps. I go for the flapped boxes, these appear to be "take out" boxes, that sounds like a good idea.
OK, it looks like the woman behind the buffet counter is dishing out the food, though she's dishing it into a row of 6 take-out boxes, must be a big order. There are about 3 other customers at the buffet counter, and I see one dishing food out of a nearby bin. Not all the bins have utensils for scooping the food out. OK, I'm a little confused if there is supposed to be some sort of method here, but I think I can blunder through it. The lady behind the counter seems to be asking me if I want something that's she's pointing to, it looks good, vegetables of some sort, so I hand her my box and she scoops some in. She hands it back and I use some tongs to get myself something else closer to my side. About half the food I want, and half I don't want. Today I didn't want an entire fish, at least not that big, so I get the little tiny fish mixed with peanuts instead, serving myself. I notice an 8 inch pink squid being plopped onto somebody's tray. I love squid, but I'm pretty sure this one has all of it's guts inside, I don't like guts, I think... Maybe next time I'll try the squid. It ends up costing 100 kuai, $3. The fast moving ancient little man at the end of the buffet closes my little box with a rubber band, sliding in chop sticks under the rubber band, and he puts a little paper bowl of rice in a small bag, puts it all in a bigger bag, doing all this with quick efficiency. How can you eat at this buffet without noticing the efficiency? All of this without computerized equipment and cash registers, just a little tray of money and stacks of bags and chop sticks where you pay.
Within seconds I'm smiling and around the corner with my pretty little buffet bag (it has cartoons on the box if you look at it). In less than a minute I'm on the second floor in my room, sitting on the floor using my little green plastic three legged stool as a dinner table. I get back up and microwave some water for green tea. It's kind of exciting to eat at home for some reason, half my meals are not eaten here, plus this is "buffet food," half of which I've never had.
I liked most of it, but what I thought was some sort of tofu turned out to be some sort of pork fat squares with a tiny bit of meat on them, and skin too, I think I ate a pig nipple. I ended up only eating half of the translucent pork fat, which isn't really too bad if you kinda mixed up with other stuff, I don't understand why Taiwanese people aren't fatter though. The vegetables were shaped like green onions, they were great, little fishes with peanuts were good. The chicken was not too bad, I am still not used to all the bones being left in though. The way they served the chicken appears to be almost the entire chicken, gutted and beheaded, and then sliced into small chopstick-able portions, bones and all, like chicken cross sections. So one piece was mostly bones and cartilage, but the other 4 pieces where mostly meat. As I ate the chicken, maneuvering around the little bones, I remembered about a month ago being at someones house for dinner. I had a similar problem with a little piece of meat and bone, in a soup. It took me 10 minutes to eat it, even though it was small, and this little 5 year old girl says after awhile in English "What is he doing!" Of course her mom scolds her and I just smiled at her instead of trying to explain that "I don't know how to eat meat with bones in it." Which might seem absurd to her. But me, I'm still new at this.
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