Day #115: Night markets

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Every city in Taiwan has a night market, and Taipei has several dotted around. The stalls come alive as soon as the sun goes down, which is around about 6pm here now. Shops (mostly cheap, throwaway clothes and shoes, aimed at teenagers, who make up most of the markets' customers) spill out onto the streets, interspersed with stalls selling food and drinks. The food is commonly cooked in front of you - anything from simple stalls selling one fried food, such as chicken or sweet potato sprinkled with salty flavouring, sold by weight, to stalls selling a whole range of raw meats, fish and vegetables, where you pick up a bowl and pile it full of everything you want them to fry or make into noodle soup in front of you. Dumplings - made there and then by assembly lines of staff rolling dough up into the raw dumplings ready for steaming - and fresh fruit juice stalls are also popular. There are also usually amusement arcades featuring what in England would be end-of-pier games.

In Taipei the two markets I visited are the Raohe Night Market and the Shilin Night Market, two of the biggest. The former is much more crowded but has a much wider range of food, the latter focuses on clothing. The formal sit-down meal is not really something that exists in Taiwanese culture - snacking through the night market, or eating at street cafes, is the norm. The advantage for a foreigner is that you can get by well enough by pointing at what you want to eat.

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