Food Heaven - aka Taiwan

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I'll apologise in advance for 90% of my pictures being of food. However, this simply cannot be helped since food dominates life in Taiwan, at least for the tourists. The night markets are infamous there and any tourist destination you go to also has an abundance of food stalls. Having come from Hong Kong (which is obviously not the cheapest place), the street food and Taiwan as a whole was cheap which meant we could eat lots and lots. Something I regretted as I had to don a bikini when I got to Laos a few days later!

Despite both politically 'belonging' to China, Taiwan and Hong Kong are very different in many ways. For a start, in Taiwan the main Chinese language is Mandarin whereas in Hong Kong its Cantonese. In addition, unsurprisingly due to our colonisation, a lot of people in Hong Kong speak very good English whereas we found that in Taiwan most people spoke little to no English at all. This lead to massive issues with our taxi driver when trying to find out hostel at 3am and ended up with us being dropped in completely the wrong place and having to find another taxi and point and hope he'd understand.... stressful at the time but all character building haha! This isn't an uncommon situation to me since not many people in Fukuoka speak much English either but it was more difficult in that I speak no Mandarin whatsoever whereas I can say some things at least in Japanese and my friends in Japan speak practically fluent Japanese. I also found that we were stared at a lot more in Taiwan, despite being in the capital city which I was surprised at, however I guess Taiwan must not get that many western visitors.

It was the latter half of Chinese new year when we arrived in Taiwan and we were slightly anxious about what would be open since we had read lots of things online that had told us that everything including all the night markets would be closed. Nevertheless, we were pleasantly surprised to find that whilst some of the smaller shops were closed, the majority were open, especially in the centre of the city. In fact a benefit of it being Chinese new year is that we got to see some traditional festivals, like a lantern festival. This was actually held just outside the city in a place called Pingxi which although geographically is only a few miles away, it took us HOURS to get there. Taiwan public transport is definitely not as reliable as what I'm used to in Japan; all the trains were delayed! We met a crazy albeit lovely Taiwanese woman on the way who really took a liking to me and made me sit with her and put her jumper on me, told me her life story and even started singing for me, very loudly, at one point! We also met some other people who were travelling or just visiting Taiwan too and we ended up spending the evening with them and we set off a lantern together. The festival itself was smaller than I was expected, especially considering its a pretty famous one. It was a street with lots of food stalls (of course) and then an area where people were writing on and then setting off their lanterns. However despite the looong time travelling there and back and getting off at the wrong stop because crazy lady told us too, it was a really fun evening and something I feel many tourists don't get to see.

We stayed in a hostel called The Meeting Place that's run by this awesome Irish guy which gave us loads of information and good tips about the city as well as played drinking games with us and even came out with us one night (for which he never forgave us for his hangover!). On our first day we decided to go and do the touristy stuff like go to Taipei 101 (the tallest building in Taipei) and of course get some bubble tea! Taiwan is the home of bubble tea apparently, something I only found out a few days before going, however I must admit I was disappointed because in Japan you can get bubble tea in loads of different flavours but in Taiwan it is only the original milk tea flavour which is far too sweet for me! We had been told not to pay to go up Taipei 101 and instead to climb the mountain, Elephant Mountain, which is behind the building since you got a much better view of the entire city and it was free. It was a really warm, sunny day which was nice but meant that the trek was a hot and sticky one however the view from the top was definitely worth it! I would definitely recommend this to anyone visiting Taipei.

Unfortunately, that was our only really sunny day but given that it was February, it can only be expected really. One day we took the gondolas up into the mountains up to a famous little tea town and only the way down, it had misted over so much that you couldn't see anything which was pretty scary whilst hanging in midair! It was a really fun day but we found that, as expected, it was plagued by tourists and as a result everything was expensive and really busy. We couldn't believe how much it was to get a cup of tea in a place that was famous for its tea and had so many tea houses! Of course there were loads of food stalls there and it was here that I tried an ice cream spring roll! It was the normal rice paper used for spring rolls with a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of pineapple ice cream with caramelised nuts on top and coriander. It may sound like a strange mix but it was delicious.

One really cool place we went was Ximending which is a famous shopping district for younger people (its been labelled the Harajuku or Shibuya of Taipei). There were so many different shops and restaurants here. Some with weird themes like a toilet restaurant where all the meals are served in a toilet seat haha! We didn't actually end up shopping, other than buying food off the street vendors but it seemed as though this was the place to shop, drink or just go for general entertainment for young Taiwanese people and it was so busy.

I'd heard so many good things about nightlife in Taipei but unfortunately I don't feel like I got to experience the best of it whilst I was there. There are few reasons for this; firstly we were only there for 3 nights, one of which we didn't arrive until the early hours, secondly we had a great group of people in the hostel with whom we got carried away playing drinking games and thirdly the night we did make it to a club, I don't remember it! My rubbish drunken memory strikes again. I'm pretty certain this is a sign that I will have dementia when I'm old! Nevertheless I enjoyed my nights there thoroughly and although I'd love to go back and experience the clubs for real, I don't feel like it had any negative impact on our trip not going since we did so much in such a short space of time.

The hot springs was an interesting experience... I've been to lots of them in Japan but in Taiwan they are a bit different. In the ones we went to you wore swimwear unlike in Japan where you must be naked so not to contaminate the spring's water in any way. The hot springs were all in the district of Beitou and there were a whole range of them from posh hotels that offer the hot springs to the public ones. We went with the public ones after reading about it on the internet but we were surprised by the people there! First, we were told we couldn't use our student ids because we were English (even though we'd read online that we were entitled to student discount) and then we had a Taiwanese woman continually shouting at us in Chinese whilst we were stood queueing for the changing room! We also noticed people getting out of the pools as we got into them and at one point a man with a big camera stood trying to be sneaky but obviously taking pictures of us!! Despite all this, we really enjoyed the hot springs; they had 5 or 6 pools all with differing temperatures so it was really relaxing.

I couldn't write this blog without dedicating a huge section of it to the night markets and their food, they were sooo good. There were so many of them and they were so cheap! It felt as if we were eating continuously over the weekend and even then it wasn't enough time to try everything, although we gave it a good try! The best thing I tried would have to be Hu Jiao Bing (a black pepper pork bun). There were lots of stalls selling these since they are quite a famous food here but one market; Raohe Night Market, was the most famous for them and luckily for us this was just round the corner from our hostel! The way they are cooked is something I've never seen before; the oven is like a big barrel and each bun sticks to the walls of it whilst it is cooking. I couldn't bring myself to try stinky tofu so that would have the be the worst food I saw, or more accurately smelt! People who know me know that I will try literally anything (other than bananas) e.g. bugs in Korea and scorpion in Thailand but the awful smell of stinky tofu meant I couldn't even contemplate putting it in my mouth. The only way I can describe it is like something has died and rotted for a few weeks in the sun and then somebody has emptied the sewers onto it!!! Beef noodles are always a must in Taiwan although we didn't end up getting these until our last day, they were amazing too. We also fell into the tourist trap of buying a 'willy waffle' because we thought it was hilarious! The fried chicken we ate was literally bigger than my head! I've never seen anything like it. It was really delicious but got a bit much after a while. I felt so sick after eating it! Like I said we ate ALOT so I will end this blog with pictures of all the food since a picture speaks a thousand words and all that......

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