Taoyuan Farm

With all of the K3 classes at my school nearing their graduation, some of the Taiwanese teachers have organised field trips outside of school time for all the kids and their families to go on together. For one of my classes, K3D, my co-teacher invited me along to join them on a full day at a farm and activity centre in Taoyuan, a city just outside of Taipei.

I thought I'd give a quick overview of our day to show some pictures of my students and also the interesting cultural experience I got to have!

The day started with us preparing for a barbecue (if that's the word? My Taiwanese teacher and I both had some difficult thinking of what English word would be used). I didn't get a chance to see how the whole process worked, but basically we built large charcoal towers under which a fire was lit. While the fire was being tended to, we prepared the sweet potatoes and eggs which were going to be cooked by wrapping the sweet potatoes in newspaper and the eggs in a thick red clay. I don't quite understand what happened next, but I guess it involved the whole fire pit area being covered with some kind of kindling which would cook around it. More on this later!

A bucket full of clay covered eggs.

It was pretty messy!

After preparing for our meal, the kids played a little in this semi-maze made out of crops.

We then headed to this little area full of water pumps which shot out huge streams of water and resulted in a water fight which left everybody soaking wet...

We headed into a small wooden shelter filled with tables where we had some more food preparation! 

First, we made an all natural jelly (a lot of Taiwanese drinks have a fruity juice with small cubes of jelly inside) which involved squeezing a mesh bag filled with some kind of seed in a bucket of water repeatedly before the buckets were taken away from us...

After that, much to the delight of the kids, we then made mochi! Mochi is a popular Japanese desert which consists of glutinous rice paste filled or covered with sesame, peanut, red bean or something similar. Each table was given a wooden bowl filled with glutinous rice which we mashed until it was all a smooth (and very sticky) kind of dough.

We then scooped out chunks of this rice dough and rolled it into balls before rolling it around in peanut powder and Macha Tea Powder and eating them.

After eating our fill of mochi, we headed outside to a play area which was full of different circus-y games, such as stilt walking (see above), a game which involved rolling a large metal circle with a big metal hook and some big wooden shoes attached to string which you had to walk around with. I managed to master the stilts to the extent that I could briefly run for about three or four seconds before falling off.

After that we went fishing for shrimp in the ponds outside the farm. We all had little sticks with a small piece of dried fish (or something equally potent) attached via a string. After a short period of waiting, I got a bite, but the shrimp kept letting go after it emerged out of the water. After three failed attempts (each only separated by about 20 seconds or so-shrimps apparently aren't particularly smart), I finally managed to get my shrimp all the way out of the water and into my bucket! After some short deliberation, one of my kids decided to call it 'Dragon'.

Dragon in all his/her glory.

Some of my kids with Dragon!

After we finished our fishing, we were brought back to the place we had started where we prepared the eggs and sweet potatoes were cooking. We were greeted with a huge pile of smoking ash (like I said, I missed the step of what this ash originally was), and the parents quickly got to work of shovelling through the ash to find the clay baked eggs and sweet potato. The eggs had the clay washed off and all the food was gathered on trays. It also turned out that we had been cooking chicken in these barbecues as big metallic bags marked with the character 雞 (chicken) were also pulled out from the charcoal.

We went back to the wooden hut with the tables and were served a feast of sweet potatoes, baked eggs, chicken roasted in a Chinese medicinal herb sauce (really delicious!) and the natural jelly drink we'd made earlier. The food was all great, although I forgot to take a picture of any of it!

Our feast marked the end of the day, so we all gathered for one big group picture (followed by about ten more individual pictures with different kids, their Taiwanese teacher and me).

All in all, it was a pretty fun day out!