old fashioned shaved ice desserts from taiwan

Hey everyone, it's summer, so what do you do when it's summer, when the sun is too hot

to bear in rural Tainan County?

You do what the locals do, you hop on your scooter and have some shaved ice dessert,

or cua bing in local parlance.

Now there's a cua bing store near the small town where I live, and it's a special cua

bing or shaved ice dessert stall.

You can have your hand-grabbed shaved ice ordered to go and placed in plastic bags for

you to take home to eat or you can eat it right there on the spot.

It's very traditional, very old-fashioned.

None of your modern automated ice serving processes, it's done the way it used to be

done 20 or 30 years ago, back in the country.

Now it's very personalized, some might even call it hands-on.

In fact, the locals call this particular shaved ice stall or cua ping stall the hand-grabbed

shaved ice stall or shou zhua ping.

Shou is the Chinese word for hand and shou zhua means hand-grabbed.

Chua is the word for grab, so thus, Shou Chua Ping Lings hand-grabbed shaved ice.

Cool huh?

Very exciting.

Haha.

Now you don't see this often in the city, it's all modernized now.

But here in the country, in small town Taiwan, this is still the way it's done.

So anyone up for a bowl?

So if you're wondering how bowls and cutlery are washed here since it's outdoors and they

They only have one faucet.

They get their water from the melted ice in the bucket the stall owners use to cool their bottled water and tea.

Once again, this is Misadventures in Taiwan podcast.

Thanks for listening, everybody. Have a fun summer.