Being a student, you have to find ways to try and live the good life but without the expense. Many supermarkets will put out samples of the foods available. Taiwanese love this and there will often be big lines waiting for something. But as I've mentioned before that in Taiwan it's not the food that makes them line up, it's seeing a line that makes them line up.
Regardless, I would always look at this and think "oh so low class" while polishing my monocle and checking my pocket watch. Well maybe not that extreme, but i never did line up for a sample. However now I have definitely become a sampler. Not to sound homeless, but on weekends especially you can easily get a whole meal out of it.
Granted I've never gone this far (or rather i'm not willing to admit it on a blog), but there is one place that if I'm in the area, I will go for my "tea time." It's a supermarket that has a pretty nice bakery so i will go around and taste some of their bread samples. A bit to my shame, I recently discovered that they also have samples of various nuts, dried meat, and dried fruit.
On a recent trip to this supermarket, I was walking out after my bread sample tea time, and thought to myself "should i go back and have dried meat and fruit samples?" I ignored my soul's cries of "NOOOO!" and went back to do some more sampling.
It's a good thing I did. While they didn't have any samples that day, I did discover something surprising. They have a deli...of sorts. They have some sliced meats and cheeses for sale. This was very exciting, as I've been calling out for more than just the one deli in the country, but also a bit sad, as the quality wasn't very great. Yes they have turkey, but it's processed turkey. And they didn't really have salami, so I got pepperoni instead. The cheese was the same as my usual place, but the slices were small and thick, not really sandwich material.
My gripes were pretty unimportant though as everything was much cheaper here, and on my budget it would make much more sense to get my food here. So that's what I did.
In the end, it wasn't great, but it also wasn't terrible. Besides this is who I am now. I'm no longer a fresh turkey guy, I'm now a processed turkey guy.
