Day #134: The best way to eat in Taiwan

---

Not a lot of English is spoken at night market stalls, but this isn't usually a problem as the food is on display, so it's easy to point at what you want. My favourite way to eat in Taiwan are the fried food and noodle stalls, where the sellers have on display a huge range of fish, meat and vegetables and a pile of bowls and pincers to one side. You grab a bowl and put whatever items you want in it, then the food is cooked in front of you, and flavoured with chilli according to your taste. Some of these stalls simply fry the items you have selected, others make them into noodle soup (if you have this as a takeaway, it comes in a bag, like carrying away a goldfish from a fairground stall). The range of produce to choose from between these stalls is enormous: some specialise in one thing - one stall I saw sold only roasted and fried duck, but they sold every part of it separately, including the head and feet, so you could just pick out the parts you wanted - whereas others have a bit of everything. As another traveller remarked to me, you start off wondering that they find a way to eat every part of the animal here, but then when you think about it that probably happens in England too, it's just that it is disguised as burger or sausage.

---