Taipei Day 2 - Danshui old street / Fisherman's Wharf / Shihlin Night Market

Getting lazy to re-post all the photos which I've already uploaded on facebook. Think I'll just write my thoughts, and keep the photos here to a minimal.

Photos: https://www.facebook.com/alan.teo.986/media_set?set=a.10152315978921356.1073741856.701936355&type=3&uploaded=20

Danshui old street is a nice quaint place, with many specialty snacks like tie dan, fish crackers, so do google and check out what to buy before coming. And don't be an idiot like me who bought from the first stall you come to... I did that and got overcharged by 20yuan per packet of tiedan.

We also tried A-gei, which wasn't that great. We liked the fishballs and beehoon there more. A surprising delight was the green tea macchiato from Lattee!

It's a huge ass cup of thick green tea, with a generous layer of milk on top. Of course, served without a straw, as the correct way to drink it is to tilt the cup enough such that the green tea rushes into your mouth together with a little bit of milk. Yummm.

We went to lover's bridge by ferry, (You can use Easycard to take it! Don't be taken in by the lady yelling for you to buy tickets) but the bridge was closed -_- We still got to watch the sunset from the pier, which wasn't too bad. Nice and relaxing.

We went to Shihlin at night, which was hell. The streets were packed and it was like being squeezed with sardines. And the basement food court felt like IT fair on the first day on a weekend - can barely move and can't change direction, and the whole place smelled of chou toufu. Didn't like it much.

The highlight of the night was the Black Pepper pork bun, which is found somewhere upstairs. Sorry, no idea how to give directions because the whole place was a mess. Good luck!

Taiwan/Taipei - Day 1 - Taipei101 and Ximending

It's been a while! I want to blog all the major events in my life so that I can look back at the year and think 'wow, I've done so much this year'. Kinda hard to blog about what happens at work because everything's hush hush, so have to make do with my leisure activities (more interesting to talk about anyway)

So I just came back from a 5D4N trip to Taipei with the gf, so I'll blog about the individual days, once a day starting from now.

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Day 1
We flew Tigerair to taipei, which frankly is shit and the seats are really uncomfortable. The full recline is equivalent to the normal angle of a sitting chair, so you can imagine the slightly less than 90deg angle of the fully upright chair. Very uncomfortable 4+hrs.

Anyway, our first order of business was to find some tauhway which jolenezhong said was 'damn good'... so we made our way to Eslite... and found out it was the wrong one -_- Google maps shows an eslite near Zhongxiao dunhua station, which was near taipei101, so we thought it's the one jolene went. Turns out, it isn't.

SH managed to buy an interesting book from there, so it wasn't all to waste. We walked over to taipei101, and to our delight, their basement food court had the daohui!

The traditional daohui in Taipei is different from SG's in that there are much more ingredients than just beancurd. The minimum option is beancurd with peanuts, and even then it's 50% of each ingredient, unlike in SG where the beancurd dominates the dish.

This version was some jelly + peanuts + daohui. Pretty yummy! For about 50 TWD I believe.

I think she looks damn cute here so I'm posting this lol. This is the Taipei 101 mascot!

After this we headed back to Ximending to explore the night market.

A Zong mee sua, a popular stall in ximending. It doesn't have oysters, but uses scallops/squid instead I think? Fairly tasty. But according to our taxi driver, this is a ripoff. Stay tuned for real oyster mee sua in Day 5's post.

Some fried meat from the stall next to the meesua stall. Pretty good! i liked the swordfish belly and the pork. 

We also had chachago milk tea, mango milk and ji pa from Hotstar (honestly, the ji pa wasn't fantastic. I think the Singapore's shihlin street snacks is better). Yumz. 

Didn't take at picture of the mango milk, but I think it's really worth it? There were SO many mango cubes in the cup, practically half the cup. And they were all juicy and sweet and soft. Why are the mangoes in Taiwan so good?

And that rounds up the first day! Was a pretty short day, because we only landed in Taipei at about 1++pm.