First off, Happy Holidays!
Yes, I know I am extremely behind in making posts. The semester was a lot busier than I anticipated and I spent almost all of my time working on my pilot study for school (working on a Doctorate in Clinical Nutrition). At the very start of the semester I was attending a conference in Taiwan. If you were following my blog, the last post left off with my time in Taipei with my husband. This post catches us up to the conference itself.
It was held in a university hospital conference center. It was a pretty nice venue.
Welcome to the 6th Asian Congress of Dietetics!
I don't have tons to share from the conference, but I do have some fun pictures of the food and of some of the slides from presentations. The first up here is my lunch on day one. They provided lunches and snacks every day. This was my vegetarian boxed lunch.
Lots of veggies inside. Most was really tasty.
And rice, of course!
I brought it in to a luncheon presentation that was offered to only foreign attendees. Unfortunately there was no vegetarian option at this session but thankfully they let me keep my vegetarian lunch. It was a bit of a difficult task to get them to understand why I needed to keep it (they thought I wanted to eat 2 meals, I think) but eventually when other vegetarians had the same issue they let us go in and take outside food with us.
Can't lie though, I definitely kept the fruit from the meal provided in this seminar. I couldn't really resist!
This special lunch for foreigners was on Taiwanese nutrition guidelines and traditional foods. The session ended with a cooking demo.
Lunch came with some sort of really sweet beverage. I definitely was not able to drink this.
These next slides show some of the traditional Taiwanese dishes.
I love bubble tea, but I wasn't always a fan. Living Asia helps to get you accustomed to things like this that you may not otherwise have a lot of exposure too. I believe these are pretty popular in the US now too.
We definitely tried the pineapple cake while we were in Taiwan. This is one of their most famous foods.
I could smell this a mile away once I knew what the smell was. At first we thought it was garbage! Not kidding! But eventually I realized it was stinky tofu. This is really popular but I couldn't bring myself to try it.
If you saw my earlier Taiwan posts you will know that we had mango shave ice a few times. This is heavenly! This is a must-have treat while in Taiwan!
The cooking demo was presented by a restaurant known as Shin Yeh and they made these spring rolls for the group.
Here are the ingredients.
Later that day I attended a session that was presented by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Alison Steiber, the Chief Science Officer at the Academy, presented on Evidence Based Practice Guidelines for Kidney Disease. It seems that there is a very high incidence of kidney disease in Taiwan and a lot of the presentations focused on kidney disease.
Here is Alison presenting. This was a fantastic session!
Are you familiar with evidence based practice? We use this in dietetics, but other healthcare fields use this as well.
After the conference let out for the day I walked back to my hotel with my friend Naomi. On our way back we noticed a little cultural center so we walked into the courtyard to look around. I was very impressed to find this sculpture right out front of the entrance. Since I work at a WIC office and teach breastfeeding classes I was really excited to see this.
Here you can see the building entrance and off to the right is the sculpture. Very cool!
They also had this fun cow inside.
Dinner was with some fabulous ladies. Two are friends who I am traveling with and we were fortunate enough to be joined by Johanna Dwyer, who was presenting the next morning. We ate at Din Tai Fung (my third time, Cam's second, and everyone else's first) again. I didn't take pictures of everything, but we ordered this steamed cake for dessert and it was so good. I am glad I got a picture of this.
Since my pilot study research was on dietitian's research interest and involvement I attended a few sessions that related to this topic. One of these was a session on writing for a scientific journal.
I liked that publication ethics was addressed.
Another session was on umami and this was presented by someone from Malaysia so the focus was on shrimp paste, which contains glutamate.
Here is a slide showing variations on the traditional Malaysian dish known as laksa (which I love!). These all contain shrimp paste and have glutamate.
Dinner this night was the Gala and it was a huge event. We (those of us that were American guests) were impressed with the location, food and presentations by different countries. I was provided with a vegetarian menu for the evening. There were so many courses! I can't recall what everything was (and some I never knew what it was!), but it was all vegetarian. Some dishes were better than others.
In between courses were were treated to presentations of song and dance by different countries that had members in attendance.
More food...
We were treated to a bagpipe performance by Sandra Capra, who is from Australia and serves on the board of the International Confederation of Dietetic Associations. It was quite impressive!
More food...
More performances...
We were really kept well entertained and well fed!
Yes, more!
Finally dessert! What a fun evening!
Well, that does it for the 2 full days of this conference. There is one more half day to share about and then the sightseeing tour that was after the conference. I am so glad I went to this conference. It was a great experience and really well done.
QUESTIONS: What was the last conference you attended? Have you ever attended a gala at a conference? Do you play any musical instruments and have you ever played publicly?
