Taiwan Trip Part 1

Going to Taiwan was an impromptu decision.

Peter and I were browsing through Airasia website to purchase last minute tickets to Bali/ Phuket for our honeymoon and we accidentally discovered that it only cost us RM40 more per person if we are flying to Taiwan instead of Indonesia/ Thailand. Well, I've been to Hong Kong and China (Shanghai and Chong Qing) before but Taiwan remains the mysterious virgin land to me, so i'm quite excited with the idea of changing the plan. However what surprised me was that Peter was also keen to choose Taiwan. Well you need to understand that he never really showed that much of interest when it comes to the Chinese culture nor the "Chinese-ism" deep rooted in me which pretty much who i am for the first 20 years of my life. When it comes to Taiwan, what reminded him was always the image of lala mui or lala zai (bimbo girls and guys) and the Chinese entertainment show which i find extremely funny such as 棒棒堂 or 我猜 but is perceived as retarded by his standard. Being an Eurasian, marrying a Chinese girl and having in laws who only watch Chinese channels on the tele was probably something he least expected in his life. LOL

Anyway, my point is it was totally something which is unplanned for and spontaneous, but we were happy when we finally pressed the "Puchase Ticket" button on the website. And heck i was already started to look forward for the honeymoon trip the moment we did that (more than the wedding itself). And i have to say we have no regrets making that decision at all. Taiwan is definitely a FUN place to travel to. There are so many places to see and new things to experience. However, i must say that THE famous Taiwan food which we very much looking forward to was not up to our expectation. It's good but not great enough. There are not much of varieties and if you have tasted food from 1 night market, you have probably tasted all.

Now this bring us to our first night at Taiwan, which is the visit to ShihLin night market. You can tell how eager we were trying to get a taste of the Taiwan food as we literally ran to the so called biggest night market in Taipei once we checked into our lodging place. Frankly, we were expecting like a mile long of street food hawkers but i have to say that our Ming Tian food court at Taman Megah is probably better than ShihLin food stalls. There were not much of varieties and the stalls were serving the same food at every corner. And to make it worse, the smell of smelly taufu is everywhere. I described the smell as shit smell, Peter thought that it was a rotten carcass smell.

Ps: The smell will stick to your hair and Peter literally forced me to go shower and wash my hair once we back to the hotel.

However overall, it was a great eating experience as i have finally tasted "big sausage wrap small sausage". There were so many flavors such as garlic, spicy, wasabi etc., and do you know that the big sausage is actually the sticky glutenous rice?

I think no ones does chinese sausage better than Taiwanese ;)

This is something like a torayaki which filled with different fillings like Red Bean Paste, Carrot slices and butter, and it only cost like RM3 (T$30) for 3.

This is the famous O-ya-jian at RM5 (T$50). In my opinion, Malaysian version better. The taiwan version has to many gelatin like material which the texture is like jelly except it has no taste.

This is another famous pastry which called big pastry wrap small pastry. it wasnt physically appealing so we give it a skip.

We saw some other interesting food like this sausage stall which sell scallions (green onions) wrapped in bacon. This reminds me of Hannah's version of bbq must have- Shitake wrapped in bacon.

Guess what is the most satisfying meal at the end of the day which drew the biggest smile from Peter's face after being tortured by hours of the infused smell of smelly toufu.

It's Yoshinoya's beef rice (T$780). The beef was tender and it tasted heavenly with teriyaki sauce and some ginger mince. Can you imagine that Yoshinoya in Taiwan opens for 24 hours, its 7-11 equivalent. It was truly a fast food restaurant whereby you need to go to counter to order and take your own food and the best thing is the food was served within minutes of ordering.

See how long is the streaky beef strips.

Anyway, thanks to Yoshinoya. the first night of food hunt was ended satisfactorily. Stay tuned for my next post on Taiwan Trip.