Taiwan Trip Part 2

The second day of Taiwan started off with onion pancake (蔥油餅) at hawkers stall at the underground shopping street of Long Shan Temple MRT Station.

Frankly the onion pancake tasted alright, i've asked the aunty to add in pork leg pieces however its still a bit bland to my taste bud. There were alot of this funny leaves (i think its 九層塔- chinese basil leaves) inside which resembles some sort of herb taste and its kinda over powering.

Anyway, back to the Long shan Temple. The temple is huge but not as huge as our Ke Lok Si at Penang, there were many lady monks (do you call them nuns as well?) praying earnestly to the idols and there are seas of people buying the lucky charm and burning joysticks.

The infamous temple is located in a very old part of Taipei city called Wan Hua District. Peter and I were amused by so many old people wandering around the old streets and run down buildings in this area. It actually felt like the other side of the coin of the Taipei City which was never surfaced in those tourist advertisement on the tele. In fact it was a stark contrast of the picture of clean and advance Taipei city which we are more familiar with.

We got to know more about the old district when we went to the next destination which is 剥皮寮. The old district were inhabited by the Taiwanese natives- Bangka or Mongka (艋舺), during those early days, the people build their lives around the tradings of goods with the Han chinese along the Danshui river, and the natives uses canoe (獨木舟) and cows as their means of transportation and that's why the place we known as Bangka (which basically means canoe in their native tongues).

剥皮寮 is one of the oldest street in Taiwan which was restored and made anew in order to preserved its historic value. We were having great fun appreciating its history, old buildings, billboards, displays, and they looked absolutely stunning in digital.

In fact there was this SHE music video and a Taiwan local movie named Monga which talks about gangsterism, underworld activities, sex trade etc. which were being filmed here!

There were many old quarters/ shop houses being converted to living museum, whereby the history was described in details through posters and pictures hang on the wall, on top of that, there is a multimedia room which shows documentary of 艋舺 to the tourists. After we get bored with all the history, we started to do some funny things to entertain ourselves.

We were giggling like children when we took those pictures. It was super funny.

Next stop was the famous shopping street Xi Men Ding. Its a shopping heaven for the youngsters, whereby there were many street performances, concert being held in this busy hippy street across the year.

It was actually kinda hard to believe that we were still in the same wan hua district (its just a station away from the old 艋舺 area) but in Xi Men Ding everything spells of modern and civilisation. Except that they do have one historical building in Xi men ding which is the red house theatre. It was originally a market building and was converted to a theatre. we find that it was kinda boring since we didnt really plan to do shopping, hence we went to have a bowl of the famous "Ah Zong Mee Sua" before we moved on to our next destination.

Well, again, its too bland to my liking. Basically its mee sua in thick sweet soy sauce with some chicken skin strips and corriander leaves. You can see from Peter's facial expression that it was not up to his expectation as well. In fact he thinks that my mom chicken essence mee sua is much better than Ah Zong mee sua. :)

Stay tune for my Taiwan Trip part III post. Gosh, i've written a full post for only half a day of the trip, and i still have another 5 1/2 days of trip to cover!!!