Look closely and you can see the bananas in the background. Look even closer, and you will see little drops of nectar from the flowers. You could actually go right there and pick it off with your fingers, and yeah, I know it was nectar because I tasted it. - An test that caused everyone else near the plant to also go and do the same while expressing amazement. Also, you can click most of the pictures to get to their flickr page and see a bigger version of them. From there, you will also be able to find some of the other pictures that I took on the trip, but didn't put on the blog. (Although, I didn't put very many of those up either. I generated over 400MB of pictures and 50~100MB videos during the trip, and flickr will only allow me to upload 100MB a month because I'm a cheapskate.) When I get my computer, I will reprogram and put up more media on zunavi.
The now not so big sales center, which is reduced to just a little tourist shop now, has a very long name.
They sell soft and chewy milk amongst other goodies.
Yet, milk is not really what this store is concentrated about. No, the fruit above is their speciality. And they can use them for making anything: Wine, shampoo, medicin, pudding, "chewy milk", icecream and probably also clothes, buildings, gasoline and everything else you need to fuel a society. As far as I can see, it does not have any psychoactive drugs worth of notice inside, however.
I just found out that it is called persimmon because of the above picture.
This is what the taiwanese persimmon fruit is most commonly used for: cakes. In this case actually rather icecream, but it follow the same principle. You peel, bake and dry the fruit, and then you put something inside. This is probably one of the better of the icecream I've eaten through my life.
More seafood gluttony today as you can see.
Tiny shrimps in the rice. This rice was really good, actually. Very tasty and with a lot of different vegetables and seafood mixed in.
Star fruit!! :D
Later that day, we went to a soy sauce factory. So here, I got some soy bean and salt. So making soy sauce is actually pretty easy, I just found out. You take some black beans (yeah, there's yellow soy beans too, but those are not used for soy sauce, the yellow ones are used for soy milk instead), and so you mix them beans with salt, then put them in a jar and cover it with salt. Afterwards you seal it and put it under the sun for 180 days. So that's what I did, the jar is standing out on the balcony now. In a half year, I can make my own soy sauce.
On the way back towards Taipei, we had a break at a pretty big and fancy place by the highway with a lot of restaurants and the biggest public toilet I've seen so far. In this place they had this fishtank with some really cool and also funny jellyfish, so I took a video.
Joni thinks this is maybe Taiwans biggest place for highway stops. Chingshuei. As always, lots of people there.
And for the dinner, we ate even more lots of food. These people are really not afraid of gaining weight. I mean, sitting still in a bus all day and then eat so much. Of course they sang karaoke all the time, so maybe that can burn some of the calories. I know karaoke can be hard - especially if you have to stand up in a bus at the same time. And just by the way: The above food is goose stomach and goose liver. The restaurant we visited is very famous for all the different goose dishes they serve.
Cooked bamboo sticks covered in goose egg. These two go really good together, since the bamboo has a lot of water in it, and the goose egg is very salty.
GET!
Finally we went back to Taipei. Here's my two taiwanese cousins in the bus, wishing that you have a nice day. And that's it.
Finally I've managed to finish the weekend trip around taiwan with my rotary club. As you can see, even just driving around with a bunch of old people can easily be one of the most interesting experiences in your life, or at least for a big part of your life. You just have to drive around with the right kind of old people at the right place. For an example in Taiwan.