Taiwan Day Eight: Down on the farm

We all slept in late today, but as it was the sisters’ last day here (a Sunday), it was decided to spend this afternoon at the farm, having a barbeque. All except Jessica, who had a lunch date with a high school friend of her’s. So off I went with Mike and everybody out to the farm where a makeshift grill was set up over a makeshift bbq made out of a car wheel hub. Baba also had a steamer/griller set up into which we put a chicken. If you want to cook chickens here, you better get ready to dealing with the whole chicken. They come with head and feet intact. Mike suggested we stuff garlic and basil under the skin instead of inside as everybody else was ready to do. I bent back the legs and stuffed them inside the body cavity, which is a yoga postion that a chicken can do only in death. The chicken was then sat upright on a spit and lowered into the pot and cooked very quick. Thirty minutes later I was having some lovely roast chicken.
We didn’t stay too long and Ken stopped by to help cook some pork on the grill. He drives the family car now, and drives it three times as fast as Baba. When he took us home, we actually hung about 20 minutes before the rest turned up. After the sisters left, I walked over to Carrefour (the French supermarket chain is big here) with Mike and Lynn to look around. Upon returning, Jessica was finally back from her eternal lunch. But then, bleedin’ hell, another friend of hers turned up and we were stuck in the house a little bit longer. We got out finally just in time to get downtown and pick up my new glasses. Woo-hoo! Images coming soon. Unfortunately, this computer I’m doesn’t have anything approaching batch processing of images and so things are taking longer than I thought.