This is why I'm fat: Taiwanese wedding

Unfortunately, I lost most of my food pictures when I accidentally deleted my phone's picture directory D:

Overall, Taiwanese food was very similar to Chinese food. It was much more expensive than Laos or China, but compared to US prices it was really cheap (less than $3). In tend to pick small no-name no-menu restaurants I see the locals sitting in. This means that most of the time I end up eating a rice or noodle-based dish. But I did manage to eat quite a bit of sea food, which was very nice.

"Lunchbox" lunches are very popular here: you get a partitioned box which you fill with whatever you want. One thing I didn't like was Taiwanese curry: it was completely bland compared to Thai or Indian curry.

This is supposed to look like Buddha's head...

I discovered another heavenly fruit, the buddha fruit. The taste is hard to describe-- it's sweet and delicious (somewhere in between a grape, peach, and apple). To eat it, you cup your hands around it and rip it in half to make two bowls full of white and juicy seed "nodes". The seeds are long and smooth, making them easy to separate from the flesh in your mouth and spit out. The flesh is juicy and squishy like a grape, but not as limp.

Young pineapples being grown.

I ate quite a variety of tofu. I have never really been a fan of soy products, and I still don't like tasteless, white, squishy tofu cubes (unless they are fried and smothered in sauce). But there is a whole world of tofu out there, from vanishingly thin strips swimming in your soup to chewy spicy tofu slices. The most surprising I ate was a fruit-flavored tofu desert pudding- pretty good!

Texture of some fruit I passed.

One type of tofu I have not talked about yet is stinky tofu, and boy, it is stinky. It smells very disagreeable, like sweat gym socks incubated in a small room. Sometimes you can smell it a block away, and hardly a day went by in China or Taiwan when I wouldn't smell it being made somewhere. One of my hosts insisted I try it, and you know what, it wasn't all too bad. It's definetly an aquired taste.

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While visiting Jenny in Luodong, we were invited to a local wedding by some of the couple's friends. It was a Christian wedding, but had a completely different vibe from the ones back home. I didn't take many pictures out of respect.

Mixed meat stew.

After a very long ceremony involving lots of choreographed singing and dancing, the couple finally tied the knot and we headed to a restaurant. The food was amazing. I estimate about 20 unique dishes were served in wave after wave. The seafood was particularly great: giant shrimp, fish of all kinds, snails, and other delicious sea creatures. And, of course, chicken, salad, and all kinds of deserts.

Fish, lobster, and crazy delicious sushi.

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Previously in this series, I wrote about drinking mind-blowing fresh squeezed juices in Laos. I never knew fruits could taste so good! Unfortunately, the experience has ruined fruit juice for me. The stuff I can taste the immense amount of sugar added and feel repulsed. So from now on, I'm swearing off anything that isn't 100% juice: it's overpriced, has too many additives, and is just not worth it for me.