六合夜市 (Liuhe Night Market), KaoHsiung

 

 

I didn't eat much that night. I was suffering from indigestion, and I think I only had a few bites of "Oh-Jien" (Oyster Pancake) - top pic.

I remembered drinking the papaya milk from one of the stall, and the night market is not as crowded as Fengjia at Tainan but it had large numbers of Chinese Mainlanders (from PRC). When I asked how much things were, the seller would also give me the price in RMB instead of NT$.

We retired early to rest in the hotel as I was feeling a little sick all night.

Anping Part 2

Next thing, we walked around looking for this Grandpa's Winter Melon drink shop.  It wasn't very hard to find given the number of crowd outside the shop. 

The menu to give you an idea. But we bought the 'original' winter melon. It's very refreshing on a warm autumn afternoon.

 

There were families, children, teenagers around the Anping fort area.  We found lots of kids on these machine. THere were lots of the 'tikam' type game and I time traveled to the 80s while I was there.

Jake trying some crunchy oysters.

Finally, jake bought lots of keropok to bring home. They tasted very different from the Mukah ones.

安平 Fort

Happy New Year everyone. After a long hiatus, I am back blogging. 
After my trip in October, I had to rolecover at work so blogging was put on hold.
Now I am really far behind with my travel postings. 

After Taichung, we went on a day trip to Tainan. Particularly, we visited the Anping fort well, the markets surrounding the Fort.

Jake brought me to this little eating shop.  He had came here in his last trip.  It was very crowded and basically had to wait to be seated. We were pretty lucky to have found the seats without much waiting.

This is the taro cake.

This one's a fish  羹 (read as geng1) and is thick and smooth soup cooked with starch.

This one's similar to Sibu's Dian Miang Ngu but the soup is not thick.

The famous 'Coffin' bread 棺材板 (read as Guan Chai Ban).  It's a famous Taiwanese snack and can be widely found in all the Taiwanese night market.

 

This is something that everyone orders so we followed suit and ordered some too. Again, I am trying hard to recall what it was called.

 

This one's a type of meat roll thingie. Sorry after 3 months, I forgot what it was.

 

S is for strawberry

I picked these strawberries from my only surviving strawberry plant today. Tastes pretty good.

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.