Our Indulgences in Taiwan - Part 5 Ximending and Dan Shui

These are probably more commonly known places in Taipei - Ximending (西門町) and Dan Shui (淡水). Ximending was actually where our hotel was, we stayed at Westgate hotel which is fairly new and just 5 minutes from the Ximen MRT station. Although it's less than 6 months old, we were slightly disappointed that despite clean rooms and good service the dining area was infested with mozzies. That was quite a spoiler. But anyway let's focus more on the good food we found around the area instead.

Firstly, of course the famous Ah Zhong Mian Xian / Mee Sua. The queue nowadays seem much more manageable, we were there at about 3pm and got our big bowl of meesua pretty quickly. Still a favourite, remember to add more vinegar and chilli!

Then, along some of the main streets within Ximending you will find some peddling hawkers (unknown whether they are legal or not) but this friendly uncle was selling Cong Jua Bing (葱抓餅). It's like a roti prata with spring onions but you can choose what you want to be wrapped inside the 'prata skin'. We chose to have pork floss, and it was pretty yummy!

On one of the days where we got sick of the hotel breakfast, we decided to venture out into the vicinity and found this little local stall which sells a variety of dan bing (蛋餅). This is a typical local breakfast dish, again something similar to roti prata but the skin is thinner and has egg mixed into it. They also add on a sweet-savory sauce on top making it a great tasting combination.

A good way to end any day is pop into one of the many convenience stores and grab some Taiwan beer. These are a few we bought, personal favourite is the Grape flavour in the middle. Tastes like a fizzy grape juice!

Moving on to Dan Shui (淡水), we didn't eat much in the area because honestly there's nothing much to eat. We found the old street over rated, not sure is it because we were there on a Monday and it was drizzling so many stalls were not opened. The only snack we got was a taro biscuit, essentially 2 pieces of butter biscuit with taro paste in between. Not bad tasting but was kind of grossed out by the black oil it was being fried in. But for that moment we just decided to adopt the mentality of dirty-eat-dirty-grow-up, literally.

After that we took a walk to the Fisherman's Wharf (漁人碼頭), but along the way we saw 2 boars being chained to the outside of a stall selling betel nuts. Here's one of them, the other one is further in the background if you can spot it.

May look a bit fierce, but rather I found them quite poor thing. Have no idea why would anyone want to keep them chained up like that.

And the finale for the evening, great scenery at Fisherman's Wharf. Although it's not as vibrant as I last remembered it to be many years back where there were some musicians peddling their songs and so on, it was still a great place for some nice pictures.

Here concludes our experiences at Ximending and Dan Shui, we'll be sharing our one-day itinerary to Shifen-Jiufen-Keelung in the next post.

Our Indulgences in Taiwan - Part 4 Shida Night Market

We visited Shida night market after some sight seeing at Sun Yat Sen memorial hall, so the convenient station for us was to drop at Guting so we only needed to change line once. However, from Guting it will take about 15-20 minutes walk to reach the night market. For a shorter walking distance, we will advice to change to the green line and alight at Taipower Building station instead, from there take exit 3 and it's about 10 minutes walk.

Shida night market (師大夜市) is actually located just beside the National Taiwan Normal University so you would expect to see a lot of students hanging out and some shops selling hostel necessities. Do take note that due to some resident complaints, the shops abide to a curfew so they will start closing by 11pm which was a bit disappointing cos we would have appreciated more time to shop and eat. Besides having found some good food here, there are also many boutiques selling clothes and accessories which you can bargain and get some good buys. Best night market so far for shopping!

Back to food, we found our favourite smelly beancurd and pig intestine mee sua here from the same stall. This stall is situated near the back gate of the university hostel. As Chillin Boy doesn't fancy oysters, we stayed clear from oyster mee sua so this is a good find as a substitute - pig intestine mee sua. The pig intestines were chewy and had no overwhelming piggy smell, the best part is the thick soup was a perfect combination of savoury and sweetness.

From the same stall, we ordered the smelly tofu and we must say this is the best we've had so far. It is fried till crisp but not dry, the inside is still moist and the sauce that came with it was a good mixture which is tasty with a slight tinge of spiciness.

After the meal, we walked down the street and bought the pig blood glutinous rice cake (豬血糕). Interesting how they make this snack, coated with peanut powder. The glutinous rice really filled us up to the brim, was too full to eat anything else.

But on our way back to the mrt station, we passed by a bakery and cannot resist buying some mochi back as dessert. Purple rice mochi, something new and seems like a healthy option. Tasted great as well, very Q-chewy and the rice exudes a strong fragrant smell. 

Shida night market is a great place to hang out, both for food and shopping. Even after the shops close, you can still buy a drink and sit at some nearby garden benches to chill out amongst many of the university students. A great way to kinda relive our university days =)

Our Indulgences in Taiwan - Part 3 Ningxia Night Market

Ningxia night market (寧夏夜市) is one of the lesser known night markets amongst tourists, but it has the best food amongst all the Taipei night markets we've been to (no kidding). It is located in the old city called Datong and along Ningxia road. We dropped off at Taipei Main MRT station and took about 15-20 minutes to walk there, along the way 2 local girls even asked us for directions how to get to the night market. Luckily we have a data sim card so the GPS is always at hand.

This night market is all hustle and bustle, crowded and long queues at many of the popular stalls. The first snack we had was a chicken sausage cos we were very hungry and wanted to grab something quick, it turned out quite nice actually!

We read that the famous food here are the braised pork rice, muachi dessert + peanut soup and the taro balls. But as the taro ball stall queue was really horrendous, unfortunately we didn't have a chance to savour that.

Here's the braised pork chop rice we had, together with the egg seafood soup from the same stall. It's very interesting how they keep the half-cooked egg afloat on the soup, and it tastes yummy too! Pork chop rice was great, well-marinated but pity we didn't try the braised pork leg cos that looked tasty as well. This stall is  highly popular so be prepared to wait awhile for tables.

After this we had some dumplings at a nearby stall down the street, not the best cos I felt the dumpling skin left a bit of bitter after taste. Suggest to give this a miss and move on to better choices.

And of cos the famous muachi dessert! This stall has long queues as well but we were lucky to squeeze ourselves a table somewhere. You can either choose to have hot muachi served with peanut/black sesame powder or cold muachi which is buried within ice shavings, also topped with peanut/black sesame powder. We chose the latter and added a bowl of peanut soup which they are also famous for. The stall owner is a very zealous and nice auntie, to anyone who orders the hot muachi she will teach them how to cut it with chopsticks in a criss-cross manner which is supposed to be the correct and most efficient way to eat it.

Here's our peanut soup, in the background you'll see the floating muachi balls in the big pot.

And our yummy ice muachi dessert, we bought 2 balls so got the choice to mix both black sesame and peanut powder but of cos we ended up absolutely stuffed after this.

And the muachi dessert concludes one of our favourite night markets for food, next up - Shida night market.

Our Indulgences in Taiwan - Part 2 Raohe Night Market

In this post, the market that we'll cover is Raohe night market. Although much smaller than Shilin, this is also a very popular night market as it does have some good food and it's also very near the clothes wholesale market (Wufenpu) that girls love to shop at. We made our way to Raohe after visiting the Taipei 101 because they are just 2 mrt stops away, from Taipei City Hall to Houshanpi station. Take the west exit and head towards Wufenpu. Note that this is at least a 15 minutes walk as you will have to cut through Wufenpu, cross the road and past the Song Shan railway station before you see a brightly lit signboard that says 饒河街觀光夜市. This night market is not fully sheltered so if you are here during rainy season be prepared with umbrellas or you'll have to dodge in and out of the shop houses by the side to avoid getting wet. 

The first food stall that greeted us was this crowded pepper biscuit (胡椒餅) stall manned by at least 8 people, and usually a snaking queue forms all the way to the night market entrance. Luckily we were there relatively early at about 6pm so we queued for 15 minutes and got 2 piping hot pepper biscuits! They are really hot when first served, so we highly suggest digging into it only after letting it cool down a little. 

Here's how the pepper biscuit looks inside after biting into it, the skin is crispy and chewy at the same time and the filling is slightly spicy due to the pepper and there's lots of spring onions mixed in as well. Worth a 15 minute queue, not any longer though. So be there early if you want to try this!

Along the way we also bought some meat skewers and fried pork ribs to snack on, they were honestly just so-so. Then we chanced upon this stall selling fried taro and sweet potato balls so we decided to try the Taro ball with egg yolk, sounds very interesting and tasted the same as well. See close up photo below, there's actually half-melted egg yolk within the taro ball and oozes out as you bite on it. Reminds me a bit of the custard bun (流沙包).

The night market is a straight street, and it's not a huge night market like Shilin so one can probably finish walking in about 20-30 minutes. At the end of the street there are some game stalls and we spotted this old school machine! About 20 years ago this type of 'vertical merry-go-round' rides were very popular in shopping malls or neighbourhood shops and I remember always pestering my parents to let me play on it. Very nostalgic indeed.

Of course, we never complete our meal without some sort of dessert and also we were very tired from walking so a place to sit down and eat was a bliss. This ice dessert shop seems popular, it's located on the left side of the street if you come in by the pepper biscuit stall direction. Looking at the menu, we were spoilt for choice but eventually decided to have the macha ice with red bean. This tastes similar to the Taiwan-imported shaved ice dessert shops in Singapore, but have to say they are really generous with the red bean and condensed milk. Thankfully the ice neutralized the sweetness a bit. 

So this is Raohe night market for us, our favourite snack here is the Taro ball but we definitely would have enjoyed it more if not for the temperamental rain when we were there. Stay tuned for our next night market post!

Our indulgences in Taiwan - Part 1

We are back from our vacation! Apologies for the radio silence for a while as we've been busy catching up with work since we came back and also sorting/editing our pictures to share.

Taiwan is a place which we haven't been in a long time, almost 15 years for Chillin boy and close to 7 years for myself. But we must say that Taipei still lived up to it's name as the city of street food, even Hong Kong tourists were there in hoards chomping down at every night market we went to.

As we went to multiple places in Taiwan, including a short detour to Kao Hsiung we decided that it might be easier to cover by areas instead of in chronological order. Here are the places we'll cover:

Taipei - Shi Lin night market
Taipei - Raohe night market
Taipei - Ning Xia night market
Taipei - Shida night market
Taipei - Ximending
Taipei - Dan Shui and Fisherman's Wharf
Ruifang - Pingxi/Shifen-Jiufen-Kee Lung
Kao Hsiung - Foguangshan Buddha, Dream Mall, Cijin island and Rui Feng night market

Let's start with Shi Lin night market, probably one of the most popular and well known night market amongst Singaporeans. Easy to get to as well, just take the mrt to Jian Tan station and cross the road you will be welcomed by streets and streets of food, games and clothes. As some of you might know, a lot of the food stalls have been relocated to the underground basement so you'll just have to find either of the 2 entrances to get there. Although the good side now is it's air-conditioned but you'll end up smelling of the food afterwards, and some stalls have also become very aggressive as its rather touristy now.

This is the first dish we had after we popped downstairs to the basement, from one of the stalls to the left (if you enter by the entrance with escalators). Coffin board or what is known in Chinese as 棺材板. This is one of my long time favourite Taiwanese street food but it's not common in all night markets so I'm quite happy to find this once again =)

And we also ordered stinky beancurd and duck blood soup. I know that there are many people who are grossed out by pig/duck blood and also because it's been banned in Singapore over 20 years ago. I used to think the same way, but after trying it once in a Hong Kong steamboat I realised that the texture is actually very nice and yummy. So we decided we'll not spare any chance to savour this. Will cover stinky beancurd in another post as our favourite is from another night market.

And after making one round, we ended up ordering another soup from this zichar-like stall. Pig kidney soup was so-so. Below the soup it's another version of pig kidney we had which is much yummier, it's fried kidney in sesame oil. This dish is very hard to find in Singapore, firstly the only stalls I've come across selling pig kidney is bak kut teh or steamboat places and usually cooked in soup. This is the first time I've had it fried and the sesame oil gave it a very intense fragrance, the kidney pieces were tender, not overcooked and didn't have any 'piggy' smell. Very tasty and highly recommended if you like pig kidneys! Will definitely revisit this if we are back again.

After exploring the basement, we went to the streets to walk around and although we were already quite full it was a bit weird to come to Shi Lin and not have Haoda XXL Chicken cutlet (豪大大鸡排). But honestly maybe it is because the chain is already in Singapore, the chicken cutlet is no longer that fascinating to us. And we felt it didn't taste that different in Taiwan either.

Then, Chillin boy discovered a long-lost childhood favourite - the Bing Tang Hulu (冰糖葫芦).

Bing tang hulu doesn't usually catch my eye because those I recall are those in China which are made of plums, not really my kind of fruit. But here, they are made of strawberries and cherries coated with a thick hard layer of sugar and somehow the last fruit on the stick is always a tomato not sure what's the reason. But this is certainly a great way to finish off a meal.

Will be back with more on the other places of interest!