Strawberry Fields

As a rule of thumb, I'll eat just about anything that's pink. Candy, cake, bread, you name it. The chances are it's strawberry flavored.

Last year, the word got out that strawberries/strawberry flavored foods rank somewhere in my Top 1 Favorite Foods list, and my students brought me tons of strawberry food items for my birthday. If it was customary to give kindergarten students letter grades, of course they would have all gotten A's.

Last weekend
I had the luxury of spending a weekend in Miao Li County. The town of DaHu is famous in Taiwan for it's strawberry patches.

The build up to the weekend was almost as good the weekend itself. Putting together everything I'd heard about DaHu, in an Inception-esque manner I built my own mental DaHu. It was something like a strawberry theme park. Pink roads, red cars with strawberry wheels. Every shop was shaped like a strawberry and all the people were wearing little green leaf-hats. There was a ferris wheel with strawberry carriages and a fountain that was spewing strawberry milk.

My predictions were slightly off, but I was not disappointed.

The bus route to DaHu went past dozens of small strawberry patches, which later helped to explain how and why every food in DaHu was strawberry flavored.

For example, strawberry bao zi (meat buns) and strawberry meatballs,

strawberry sausages,

strawberry cream-filled bread,

and strawberry won-tons, just to name a few.

Of course there was a store selling strawberry flavored (insert food item here), including strawberry eggs. Pink and red boxes as far as the eye can see, unless you looked outside the store.

After stuffing my face in Strawberry-ville, it was time to go get my own fresh ones. A 30 second crash course from the farmer made me an expert at finding the ripe ones and being able to tell which end of the sweet/sour spectrum it would land on.

There's nothing like holding a box of fresh strawberries to stimulate all five senses (you should have heard them begging to be picked).

As long as I'm in Taiwan, I'll be in DaHu every winter.

and finally, as a special treat, some strawberry inspired cartoons that were drawn on the train ride back to Taipei...