You’ll have to bear with me as my food ordering at the moment is extremely limited. Eating weirder stuff might come later as I slowly learn what’s what here and overcome my ‘eating food = 10 minutes of ordering negotiation’ phobia.

Not knowing anyone here and currently living in a smaller town means my current speed of learning is roughly the equivalent of taking a snail, rubbing it all over with Vaseline, taking it to a ice covered mountain, pouring some water on the ice and then getting it to climb to the top.

I have a newfound respect for people who can’t speak the language living in Australia. However I think if I tried to pull the ‘I’ve lived here for twenty years and can’t speak the language’ crap we get back home I wouldn’t last here too long.

Well at least not out of Taipei. I get the feeling having not spent any time in the capital and instead venturing out into the rest of Taiwan, being armed with little more then a phrasebook I might be doing things backwards and making it harder for myself.

Still, if the bars in Taichung were anything to go by, I know I don’t want to be one of the thirty something year old desperados hanging out there who appear to have never stepped out of the comfort zone of the large cities.

Most food places here don’t have photos so all I’ve got to go on is a wall of Chinese writing I don’t understand with prices underneath.

Short of me getting lucky by saying beef, pork or chicken and the vendor being able to show me something I can then say yes to, ordering here can be pretty hit and miss.

To the local’s credit though I haven’t yet had to walk away from a place empty handed. Often spending upwards of ten minutes to order each meal daily though is starting to take its toll.

I have to be careful as there’s a real trap of exhausting myself on the language barrier if I venture outside in the morning. Then when I arrive at work in the afternoon I feel mentally exhausted.

Getting more familiar with mandarin at this point is pretty much my first priority. However without an internet connection at home, I’m kind of not really progressing on that at the moment.

In any case I walked into this place yesterday and first asked for anything with beef, which they didn’t have. Then I lucked out on pork. After mentioning pork I was redirected back to the front where they had on display one of my favourite dishes of all time, pork belly.

And boy was it some belly. Forget the little belly rinds we get back in Australia these portions were huge. After nodding extremely enthusiastically I was handed a box of rice and a pair of tongs, from what I then gathered it was self serve.

I’m not exactly sure how self serve works in Taiwan, whether they charge you on how many dishes you put in the box or if it’s a fixed price. After three pieces of belly and some sauce (I got the feeling they were a little surprised I wanted some sauce), I felt like I had enough.

I also got what looked like sweet sour soup but it tasted more oniony then sweet sour so maybe it was some time of onion soup.

Anyway, with a cup of milk tea (which as soon as I learn how to pronounce confidently will become my milo replacement every morning), this small meal set me back exactly 100 NTD, or roughly $3.30 AUD.

(and no I didn’t put the big plastic cover on the coffee table).

The pork belly had toothpicks in it for some reason, each piece had about three which was a surprise when I bit into them. I’m not sure if they were for using afterwards or if you wanted to clumsily hold the belly by the toothpicks and eat it without rice. I kinda found them annoying.

1. Taiwan Buffet: So much food, so little time
2. Cuteness Abandoned: The ugly side of Taiwan’s food
3. The best roast suckling pig in the world
4. The Taiwanese sure know how to make food entertaining
5. Teppanyaki in Taiwan