Texans in Taiwan: Wu Lai Falls, Freaky Food and the Other Woman

Matt hasn't shown up near enough on the blog. Here's a great capture!

Yesterday we spent the day at Wu Lai falls. It is billed as a quaint aboriginal village at the base of the giant waterfall.

The whole crew at the base of the falls.

The falls from the gorge.

The "other woman"

We arrived and were greeted by 7 or 8 Chinese women in the gift shop oohing and aahing over the babies. We had some tea while we waited for the "show."

We had been under the impression that the "show" was an authentic Atayal tribe dance. Well, I guess it was if you throw in a state of the art theatre, dolby surround sound and pyrotechnics! The show depicts the origins of the Atayal tribe and concludes with.... a wedding. The "wedding" number requires most of the audience to get on stage (I got to sit it out since Tessa was asleep on my shoulder). Everyone is clad with tribal wear and sings the Wu Lai song. After that, a "groom" and a "bride" are picked from the crowd.

You've probably guessed... Matt was picked for the groom and Tami was picked for the bride!!! In a shocking turn of events, they did NOT marry each other. Matt married some 20 year old gal and Tami married a guy who looked to still be in his teens :) It was a beautiful ceremony... ending with a chair strapped to Matt's back on which he carried his new "bride."

Of course, no photography was allowed but the actors snapped shots that were later put on a PLASTIC plate that you could buy for $15.

After the show we were escorted to the resort's fancy restaurant. We gorged on barbecued whole fish (here's looking at you), fried crawfish (heads, tails and all), something wrapped in a banana leaf that was pretty good, some sort of vegetable and "tadpole soup" for dessert (actually some sort of seed in a sweet sauce.) We saw lots of other tables that had yummy looking spring rolls and noodles and such. We figure Mr. Yeh had recognized that we were adventurous eaters and treated us to a "tradtional" meal :)

Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads (and some kind of crawfish you eat head, tail and all).

"Tadpole" soup.

Tessa gets fussy when anyone's eating and she's not :) Mr. Yeh sings her a Chinese baby song and claps his hands.

Next it was time to go up the mountain. Gondolas take you to the top of the mountain. Once you reach the gondola station, there are about 250 stairs to climb to get to the top!! The scenery is breathtaking... which is kind of annoying when you're already out of breath!

Hmmm.

This is about 10 feet from the "Don't Stay Here" sign :)

Bridge at the top of the falls.

Best beer in the world. The lady behind the counter was VERY confused as to why we were taking pictures of the sign. She clearly has NO idea what it says :)

This straw dispenser sits on the counter top. Wish we'd seen it before shelling out $4 for the world's best beer :)

Next Mr. Yeh took us to the local market. Once again, we LOVED the market. Emma always gets some sort of sausage with pineapple on a stick and the rest of us have a ball figuring out what things are and tasting those that don't look too scary.

Market outside of Wu Lai.