Mud Volcanoes 泥土火山

I always love the end results of seismic activity: volcanoes 火山, tall mountains 高山, hot springs 溫泉, geysers 噴水泉, etc. even if I don’t enjoy the danger of earthquakes. (I’ve never been stuck in a volcanic explosion, so I can’t speak for them.) The regions that are “rims of fire,” (火和平的圓環) such as the Pacific rim and the Mediterranean, are so much more interesting than the boring, flat and often cold regions of the world I grew up in. I guess one has to take the good with the bad. Ok, enough drivel.

We visited mud volcanoes. There is mud burping and belching up from the geothermal depths of near the shores of an inland sea. There is supposed to be magma 熔岩 just a few thousand feet below the ground. It is quite an impressive site to see. In this first photo, I captured the mud bubbling up in the crater. In the other photo, you can see that thoughtfire mom has climbed to the lofty summit 母親爬到了泥土火山的山峰上 of another such mud volcano with her granddaughter. There was a lot of sulpher smell here, reminding me a little of the sulpherous fumeroles 噴氣坑 at Yangming Mountain 陽明山 in Taiwan.

Dates 枣子

We got back from a recent trip to over the Chinese New Year the deserts of Southern California 南加州的沙漠 which I will be sharing in segments. This was one of our prizes of the trip, a 15 pound box of fresh Medjool dates for a very reasonable price 廉價. We’ll share 分享 with friends and family.

It is amazing to see all of the different types of dates grown, all from different parts of the Middle East. There are some that are very sweet 很甜. Others have a milder taste more like a fig 味道像無花果. Yet others have a dry bread-like consistency 濃度像麵包. We rushed to get back to the date palm grove where these were grown before closing time. Fortunately, we met up with a family from the Middle East who were there to buy 5 of these boxes 買了五箱, more than 60 pounds! They called inside and encouraged the lone person working there, it was a holiday, to open the door again.

Papaya Tree 木瓜樹

This is the latest addition to our yard, a papaya tree! This one is a special kind that is self-fruiting and will bear seedless 無核的 papayas.

I have always liked papayas ever since I was a little kid. I remember we went as a family to Hawaii when I was about 8 years old. Every day for breakfast I had delicious fresh tree-ripened papaya 很喜歡吃新鮮的木瓜 with lemon juice 檸檬汁squeezed on it. I liked it so much that I came home with a box of papayas that didn’t taste quite as good because they were picked green.

As an adult and able to buy my own fruit in the stores, I discovered that I could almost replicate that original taste by buying the ripest 最熟的, almost rotten 差不多腐壞的, store-bought papayas but I realize they are not the same as those that are ripened on the tree.

Restaurants 餐廳

Catching up on web surfing today, I noted a debate which I’m sure to be a day late and a dollar short on, but since the gauntlet has been laid down I’ll add my two cents about comparing Chinese restaurants in different places. A blog recently, you can find the link 連接 here, claimed that Taiwan Chinese food had lost its edge and was not even as good as that in America’s Chinese communities (he mentioned the San Gabriel Valley 南加州的聖谷 specifically.).

Chinese food in Taiwan is very good even if it is influenced by the regional Taiwanese taste. It is much better than in even the best areas for restaurants of U.S. Chinese communities like the San Gabriel Valley, with the likely exception of Cantonese food 廣東菜. Many immigrants to the U.S. are Cantonese and so that is a strong point for food, though they lag far behind Hong Kong or Guangzhou.

Even where regional Chinese food is influenced by Taiwanese taste 台灣口味, it is quite good. An example is a ‘Beijing duck’ stand near our house. The flavoring is a little different from standard Peking duck, true, but it was always freshly made and the quality (for a couple of $) was excellent. Seafood restaurants 海鮮餐廳 offering 20 or more types of live seafood are quite common (海產街).

I always use this quick and simple food test to determine the quality of food in a region. The more I find myself eating out when in a place, the better the food. In Taiwan, I found myself eating out almost every meal 雖然有廚房可是差不多每天都不在家裡吃, something I cannot say about that many places.