Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The East Coast

We took a class trip to the east coast, including Taitung, Hualian, and Taroko Gorge National Park. The beautiful (but not necessarily breathtaking) scenery was notable, but the most memorable part of the trip was the vegetarian table.

There were a handful of us vegetarians, and as most of the meals were family-style, we veggies had our own round table complete with lazy susan. The school feeds us really well, and us veggies had the benefit of having only half the people of the other tables, which means there was always plenty of the special "fake meat" dishes to go around. At lunch on the second day, we had immitation "fatty pork" with celery, fruit salad in tomato cups, veggie "mutton," and a couple of other really yummy and innovative dishes, and it garnered a lot of interest amongst the carnivores. During the meal, various carnivores would hover around our table and try some of the dishes, with very interesting facial expressions, and often beckoning to their carnivorous comrades to come try our food. For ourselves, we designated one of our own to be a guinea pig, and the rest of us would guage her expression in deciding whether or not to try the dish. It was really fun. This would happen again at dinner, then lunch the next day, and it was so much fun that we had the most adventurous food.

Here are some photos, but only if you remember to control your salivating.


something that looks like tofu, but it's not


the most mouth-watering veggie mutton


veggie fatty "pork" with celery


typical meal, it's not complete until the lazy susan is full