A Taiwanese Wedding

I was invited to a Taiwanese wedding reception. Like many things in Taiwan, it is familiar but different. In the United States, the wedding schedule goes ceremony, reception, honeymoon. In Taiwan, the wedding schedule is reception, honeymoon, ceremony. The reception is how you would imagine. There is lots of food, drinking, and music. The bride and groom are announced and walk the reception tent getting pelted with that spray string stuff and confetti. Infact, they make three walks; first in their ceremony clothes (suit and wedding gown) and then two more times where the bride dresses down into more casual dresses. And, just like the United States, after the reception the bride and groom race off to their honeymoon. They will have the official ceremony when they get back. I won't even try to speculate.


This is how shrimp is always served, head legs and all. They like 'em big too. Notice the small drinking cups too. That is because you will hear 'gambei' a lot and that means 'finish' or bottoms up. If someone your senior toasts you and says 'gambei' you need finish to save face. The older teachers like to mess with the younger teachers this way. I had a couple of old dudes with something to prove at my table. C'mon...bring it! Anyway, these are just a few of the foods we ate.


This is a soup with clams, garlic, duck, ginseng root, and shark fin tips. Shark fin tips are about the size of a fingernail and don't look anything like what you would expect. They looked like little jellyfish. Anyway, I guess it's expensive stuff since you don't get many shark fin tips per shark.

Here is the soup with the sushi platter.
Check out this short video. Yeah, it's alive! Even a few Taiwanese people were snapping photos of this dish. We did cook them on the hot plate before eating. They're some kind of oyster or clam. The rough translation I got for these was 'nine holes' because they have, of course, nine siphons along the edge. After digging the critter out you'll find a bright green sac of something underneath. A teacher at the table said, "Don't eat that." Yeah, some things you just know.