Duck Neck and Lots of Lights

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I'm really, really sleepy. I've been up for about 20 hours in a row to try to catch up with the time change.

So my description of TongHua Night Market will not be as vivid as it might have been if I had been more awake when we were there or am now. I didn't even take any pictures and I have been a picture-taking maniac so far on this trip.

And there were so many things to take pictures of on that street. Several of the group were not awake enough to go tonight, so hopefully we'll return to it or another some night this week.

There are a number of night markets around Taipei. Evidently they open sometime in the early evening and go until midnight or 1 a.m. Some of the markets specialize in a particular type of product, others are more like flea markets.

The Tonghua Night Market is a fairly narrow street that is made more difficult to navigate by the aisle of tables down the middle of the street - kind of like the Pecan Street Festival compressed.

This market had all kinds of stuff from clothes to trinkets to guys sitting in the street selling little squirrel-like creatures to dozens of unidentifiable foods.

I ate some dumplings or pot sticker like things that had some meat seasoned with spices and onions. They were a pretty big hit with the several of us who were willing to try them.

Are duck necks good? Three or four of the vendors had them bbq'd and stacked in pans with the beaks still on like handles. Quite a sight.

The foods were really what stood out there as I think back. Most of the clothes and other products looked like junk with the exception of shoes that either fell off the truck on the way from being manufactured to being shipped to the U.S., or were great knock-offs. I didn't even have the brain power to calculate the prices of them, though.

The Taiwan dollar is used almost exclusively here - the only person I've seen accept U.S. dollars is the guy across the street from the hotel in the store that custom makes men's dress shirts for $25 U.S.

The exchange rate the day before I got here was $33NT to $1US; it's $31 to $1 now, unfortunately, but trying to translate the prices takes a little thought.

I think I'm off to bed...

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