Noel's minion cake

叔叔promised Noel he would bake him a minion cake from Despicable me since Noel had been a fan of that movie for quite some time.

Check out his look when he saw the cake. Priceless.

Noel's first day at school

Noel turned 5 and yesterday was his first day at school.

My, felt like he had just started kindy.

Last week was so busy for me as I was preparing for his 5th birthday party. He had a great time at school yesterday. He sang many songs and no homework so far.

太陽餅- Suncake (specialties in Taichung)

I first tasted Suncake (Tai yang bing) in Howick CNY festival many years ago, in the early Noughties. it's not quite the pong pia in Msia.

 Only recently in our trip, I found out Suncake is the specialty of Taichung.  Jake did research and found that the best one is found on "zi you lu" in Taichung. As the name is not trademarked every shop on zi you lu is seling the suncake and everybody claims they are the best and they had been around for at least 30years etc.
We asked our friendly hotel receptionist and she told us there are kinda all the same. but she recommended us to go to 9 Suns bakery. The girl in 9 Suns were very friendly and let us taste as much as we liked. We liked the original (Maltose filling) and its shops specialty flavour the "milk custard" and these black coloured bamboo charcoal thing

 

 

 

Next we go to another 'old brand shop' 老字号called Wei Qing Hai.  Master Wei apparently had improvised the method of the pastry making.

The various mould that Master Wei had used has been framed as valued artifacts in his shop.

They also had various flavours to taste from and we bought some of the Specialty flavours from this shop.

That wraps up our Taichung trip. Next stop, Tainan.

Taiwanese sandwich

 

Our hotel supplied a simple form of breakfast. Packet drink and sandwich.  Surprisingly, the sandwich was actually pretty delicious. The bread were cotton soft (did you notice, taiwanese bakery is always soft and fluffy) and it has a piece of bbq mince pork? fried egg and cucumber.

Taichung Wet Market

The Market in Taichung is pretty similar to the ones in Sibu. There's live animals, food stalls.  Noticed in every culture, people cure meat and eat them in dried forms.  The chinese with their lap cheongs and the italians with their salamis etc

 

Above is a spice shelf or rack. It sells all sorts of spices you can think of.  Noticed lots of stalls call themselves specialist of Ginger, or Onions or whatever veggie that they are selling.

ROC Taiwan flag in front of the market

TaiChung (Central Taiwan)

View from our hotel room the city of taichung. Jake's description - it's old.

This is the main train station- we just live in the hotel behind the train station, so it was very convenient, location wise.

We had some time to kill before taking the train to Tainan. So to market we go.

Have you ever seen fresh wooden ears, they are reddish brown instead of the usual black. Maybe different species?

Fish floss is pretty popular there.  We didn't try as the packaging was huge.

 

Taiwan is famous for its 油飯 (glutinous oil rice). This stall had couple versions. We tried two. One was ginger based and one was eaten when a baby turns full moon ie. you gave away the oil rice to people when baby turns 1 month old.

If my memory serves me correctly, the rice were NT$40 per half catty (about 300g)

Snacks from Sun Moon Lake

Our driver recommended we tried the tea egg (Cha ye dan) from this particular stall.  Jake also read from some foodie blog that it is a must to try tea egg from this stall.  Anyhow, Mr Li (our driver in blue shirt) also recommended for us to try Goose Tea Egg.  It is 3 times the size of chicken egg. He also asked us to try the wild boar sausage from the same stall.

 

Me posing with the two eggs.  The Goose egg had huge yolk.

Wen Wu Temple文武廟

Bell lanterns -it chimes when the wind blows.

Here's the Wen Wu Steps of the year.  In the olden days, it was known as Stairway to Heaven as people used to come via boat and climb the steep steps up to worship in the temple. Now roads have been built and the steps renovated to have 366 steps to symbolise a leap year. 

 

 

Peacock garden

On the way to Wen Wu temple, the driver dropped us at Peacock garden for some phototaking session. Too bad the peacocks weren't exhibiting their pretty feathers.

Below some albino peacocks.

 

老街 (Old street)

To go to Sun Moon Lake from Taichung, one can take the bus (costs NT $190 per way per person) and takes 2 hours and it only gets to the Sun Moon Lake and had to take another bus costs NT $20 to 40?? from Sun Moon Lake to the cable car location.

We took the easier way (ie rent a private taxi for NT$3,000). We agreed with the driver that we want to cover the Cable car/Tribal village and then go to the Lao Jie (Old Street) an also go to Wen Wu temple. They were kinda on the way but if we used bus, would have to walk to those destinations or take taxi at Sun Moon Lake perhaps.

So above were the duck sausage stall. In NZ, whenever we go to any Taiwanese festival or Chinese NY festival, we always made sure we buy the taiwanese sausage from the stalls. but we have never seen Duck sausages in Auckland, so try that we must. It was NT $30 per sausage.

Our driver told us we had to try the stuffed chicken wing飯飯雞翅 Jake had tried them at Shilin market in Taipei but our driver Mr Li insisted that the ones in Sun Moon Lake were more authentic. Anyhow, it must be pretty good the queue was long, we queued for 15 to 20minutes and there were still at least 12 ppl ahead of us.  We went back to Mr Li as we needed to head to Wen Wu temple next. Turns out, Mr Li knows the chicken wing guy, so he helped us buy two stuffed chicken wings without even needing to queue. The chicken wing were NT $60 each.

 

Check out the glutinous filling.

It was delicious! Its definitely worth trying.

Sun Moon Lake (2)

There's also an Western Garden in the Nine Tribal Village. 

Behind us is an European inspired fountain. The sun was shining right into our eyes. *ouch

opposite the garden was the big entrance/square for the tribal village. Below is a picture of the name of each tribe in Chinese.

 

There is an exhibition of the 'cartoon' character they are promoting at the amusement park.

Above is an aerial view of part of the amusement park. Below is another 'theatre' of the tribal dance. Picture taken from the cable car.