My hotel room happens to have wireless, so I figured I’d share some of my adventures over here. I’ll be hanging out in Taiwan/Hong Kong for another 1.5 weeks or so. Since I have limited time on the internets (endless food/shopping/sightseeing options are calling), they’ll probably be segmented posts with a lot of stuff missing that I’ll fill in later when I have time/the pictures from my mom’s camera. :O If I’m feeling super ambitious/have an awesome enough memory, I might even post the Chinese names. :O (A tall order.)
Our flight to Taiwan was delayed by 2 hours, so we didn’t make it to our hotel until around 5 p.m., so we decided to explore the underground mall (I called it an underground market when I was telling my friend about it and he asked if I could buy kidneys there :X ). Somewhere along the way, we made it to a restaurant that hadn’t closed yet.
牛肉面 (beef noodles) for only something around $1.5 USD. :D!
For our first full day in Taiwan, it was a really nice day (aka not blazing hot and humid), so we decided to take the 貓空 (Maokong) gondola up to look around. For breakfast, we found a couple food stands and decided to try some of each.
This had sesame paste in it. My mom got one with red bean. :O
I also got lamb/egg/veggies stuffed in pancake-ish awesomeness.
We took one of the crystal cabins (fancy schmancy talk for glass-bottomed gondola :O ) up with a guy who was traveling alone and ended up going together to the Tea Promotion Center, where we got 铁观音茶.
We also passed by this really intense-looking guy along the way. I couldn’t help taking a picture. :X
After we took the gondola back down and after my mom and I got eaten alive by mosquitoes, we split ways. My mom and I went to 深圳 (Shenkeng) Tofu Street because I was super intrigued by the promise of tofu ice cream. (It was indeed awesome and really did kinda taste like tofu.) It was only around $1 USD, so that made it even better. I also got suckered into buying some pretty amazing ginger tea there. The vendors were really generous with their samples. :O
We took a bus back and ended up at Taipei 101, so we looked around the first 6 floors (heh heh heh) and made our way to 士林夜市 (Shilin Night Market). It was pretty difficult to resist buying stuff. :[ Fact of the matter is, we did not resist, but I think we got some pretty awesome deals. ;_; We had dinner underground.
Cold noodles!
Stinky tofu! (I finally caved and tried this for the first time. It definitely does not taste as terrible as it smells. In terms of “stinky” foods though, durian would definitely win every time.)
- Have you ever been to Taiwan?
- What would you want to try eating first?
