Big day, Saturday. It was Hsinchu’s annual Rice Noodle & Meatball Festival celebrating two of the Windy City’s local specialties. Aaron and I went with an American couple who are also new arrivals to town; we met through our blogs. (A big thank you to our new friends for supplying all these great photos. The marvels of modern technology!)
Jessica and Dan tromped with us farther and farther from downtown as we doubled back and walked in circles in the blistering afternoon air in search of noodles and meatballs. Just as my creeping doubts of the festival’s very existence began to set in, across a vacant lot we spied a rainbow-colored tent and a couple dozen white-coated culinary students hunched over steaming pots and platters. Eureka.
The festival was the first time since arriving in Taiwan we had gotten a reception akin to Western celebrities. Usually I get ignored, or occasional stares from older people.
“How did you hear about this event?” surprised organizers asked us, the only tourists in sight, as we walked in. A local reporter took our picture for a Chinese-language paper, noodles drooping from our mouths. A documentary-maker caught every sheepish grin and gulp with a video camera. Two friendly ladies invited us to watch a film they had helped create about meatball-making traditions. One of the women, Michelle, offered to show us the goods: the world’s longest rice noodle (米粉), 390 m of pure carbohydrates that had been displayed that morning.
She walked us next door to a rice noodle factory, the owner of which she knew. There we found the giant mound of noodle-coil, enough to stretch three-quarters of the way up Taipei 101. Continuing our streak of friendly, interesting people taking time to show us wonderful things, a local artist walked in, explaining to us the vagaries of the noodle-making machinery. Then, naturally, he whips out scissors and black art paper and proceeds to cut all of our silhouettes on the steps of a temple. For free. Because he wanted to share his art with us. (Even re-doing Aaron’s to get the nose just so).
Back in the meatball tent, a group of teenagers mobbed us for no good reason, giggling over our Americanness, oohing over my embarrassing Mandarin, posing for photos and insisting we swap email addresses for English exchanges.
And then another new friend, Susan, gave us a ride home, just because.
Isn’t this country great?
