Sugar Pie, Honey Bun

I had the opportunity today to see a great deal of Chiayi county. Today was the first day of the New Year, and the way most natives spend it is akin to the way most American's spend Thanksgiving. They eat a large lunch, and then hang around at home sleeping and watching the special holiday programs on T.V. While the rest of my family was hanging around the house, my uncle and I went to some of the tourist exhibits that are in the area. First, we went to the Solar Exploration Center. The tropic of Cancer passes right through Chiayi county, and this center has educational exhibits that talk about what that means.

The educational exhibits were all in Chinese, so they didn't mean much to me, but the building was cool. They also had a Gemini Rocket on display outside of the building, as well as a scale model of the solar system.

After that, we went to an old train station that used to receive trains carrying sugar cane.

 

Later, we went to a sugar cane factory. There used to be 46 different sugar cane factories in Taiwan, and cane used to be a major agricultural resource here. However, it soon became much cheaper to purchase the refined sugar from other countries, and the Taiwanese factories shut down. Now only two factories remain open, and they no longer process sugar. The factories have been turned into a kind of tourist trap/museum dedicated to the history of sugar cane farming in Taiwan. The one we went to today was hosting a small market where patrons could buy food and play games. 

Okay, so I kind of lied earlier when I said that the factory doesn't produce any sugar cane, in fact they do produce a little bit of sugar, but they use it to make specialty ice cream treats and other little things. They don't mass produce sugar, they just sell ice cream locally. The ice cream comes in interesting flavors such as: red bean, black sugar, milk, and pineapple. I've tried red bean and pineapple so far and both were delicious. I gather that "milk" flavor is really a poor translation of vanilla ice cream. 

After we walked around the fair for a bit, we took a ride on the tour train that runs alongside sugar cane fields and then through the old parts of the factory.

This is a conveyor belt that would carry sugar cane from the train to the factory.

The tour guide told us this interesting fact: You may notice that the branches of this tree seem to be cut off right where the leaves would normally be. This is because, the leaves off this particular kind of tree are highly poisonous. If you were to eat just one of the leaves, you would be dead in a minute. The tour guide failed to mention, however, why one would go around eating leaves off of random trees around a factory.

It was a cool trip, and I enjoyed learning about the sugar making process.