Winter Break Part 2: Taiwan

(continued from part 1)

After landing in Taiwan's SongShan Airport, I was greeted by my sister and girlfriend in the Arrivals lobby. Yay, reunited! But first, I emailed a buddy back in Aomori to have him call Haneda Airport and inquire about my missing glasses. Fingers crossed... I'll just have to over-wear my contacts while in Taiwan.

Like every other time I've visited, I stayed at my grandmother's place in downtown Taipei. It's two stories in a condominium-like building, and my youngest uncle's family used to also live there before they found their own place. Basically, the place is too big for just my grandma, so she liked having the company.

Since I was taking care of all travel plans in Japan, I gave my sister the responsibility of showing us around Taiwan. The result? Night markets... EVERY DAMN DAY! I definitely got a little night marketed out near the end, but there was still some fun to be had.

There's too many people...

The first thing was balloon popping. You can go to game booths and pop balloons for prizes using various methods. Some booths had darts (kinda boring), most had bb guns (a lot of fun), and some even had bows and arrows (fun, but painful). I was pretty terrible at darts, but I've gotten a lot better at the bb guns since I learned how to hold a gun correctly. They even have assault rifles, sniper rifles, and pistols with realistic recoil to make you feel like more of a badass. At the archery ones, they didn't provide us with finger guards, so I started to lose some fingerprints. Then the attendant told me I wasn't supposed to pull a full draw like I'm used to, and pointed to the red line halfway down the arrow shaft where I was supposed to stop. I had been sticking the arrows so deep into the backboard foam that the booth attendant couldn't pull them back out. He was pretty annoyed.

Next was shopping. Night markets are packed with shops selling cheap crappy knockoff clothes and trinkets. My sister went wild, going into a bunch of the stores and buying clothes and little accessories. She used to abhor fashion, and now it's all she seems to care about. She's changed a lot in the past few years. Kristin and I were much less interested, so we spent a lot of time waiting for Raina to resurface and breathe.

Finally, we get to the good part: food! Taiwan has some pretty awesome street food. The most interesting ones were stinky tofu, fried whole crabs, blood cake, and snake soup. Stinky tofu is tofu that's been fermented for a while and served with sauce, either in a soup or fried on a stick. I used to hate stinky tofu because it smells like a dirty harbor, but after tasting it, it's actually very savory and delicious. Kristin and Raina, unfortunately, couldn't get over the smell.

Fried whole crabs are delicious, albeit a bit crunchy because of the shells. Just make sure you don't accidentally eat one of the fried garlic at the bottom of the cup, or your tongue will die a pungent death.

Blood cakes are usually served in soup, and have a consistency and flavor shockingly similar to tofu. They seem pretty mundane, until you realize that you're consuming the blood drained from an animal! We had both pig and goose blood cakes this trip.

Goose blood cakes in soup

Lastly, snake soup was much more mediocre than I thought it would be. The soup tastes like chicken stock, and the snake meat was small, tough, and still connected to the spine and ribs. Eating while surrounded by live snake cages was an interesting experience, which Kristin had some trouble getting over.

They're watching me eat their brethren...

Combining the aspects of games and street food, we had some fun with shrimp fishing. You pay for a certain number of fishing rods (chopsticks with paper strings and hooks as line). You can catch as many shrimp as you can with those rods, but the paper strings break easily when they get wet. I got greedy and tried to hook some of the big shrimp, but my string broke every time I pulled them out of the water. I decided to lay off the big guys, and finally started catching some shrimp.

Kristin did an amazing job. She's now the official shrimp wrangler of the group. With fewer lines than anyone, she ended up catching the most shrimp. I think she caught more than my sister and my cousin combined, with less than half the number of rods! Spectacular! And spectacularly delicious, since they grill the caught shrimp on the spot. It was a little unnerving watching the attendants skewer the writhing shrimp up their backsides with bamboo stakes, but we got over it once we started eating.

Munch munch shrimp head

Besides night markets, we spent some time outside the city exploring temples, museums, and general landscape with my cousins and aunts/uncles. It was nice to eat together as a big family like the old days, but now that everyone is grown-up and and studying in various parts of the country, getting together is more difficult.

To top off the vacation, we crossed over to the new year at Taipei 101, once the tallest building in the world. I propped my video camera atop Kristin's head so you could enjoy the fireworks show we beheld.

The next day, we headed to the airport to begin the next stage of winter break: exploring Japan! See you next time!