tunalaksa: Day 2 in taiwan

The second day was coincidentally the Lunar 15th day of the 7th month. Prayers and rituals may be common in Singapore, but have you seen this in Orchard road?

This is right smacked at the centre of XIMENDING outside a japanese restaurant that i had dinner the previous night. And almost 80% of the other shops had some form of prayers held in front of the shop, shopping malls included.

Had Korean food for lunch and it was quite nice. Set lunches aren't very cheap....
If i'm not wrong 165NT for this ($ 8?)

Fried udon with yummy seafood

Took the train and saw this.....

In Singapore we have priority seats, and in taiwan they have it too.

If you are feeling unwell, you can approach the counters and ask for a sticker to paste it on.

Alighted at Xin Dian Station, walked diagonally left to a bus stop and take bus number to WU LAI for their natural hot spring. Tickets collected upon boarding.

Final stop is the destination, get down the bus and beware of touting taxi drivers who want to bring you on a ride to the waterfall. Definitely its going to be impressive but its not where i was going. So we went walking by the river, reached the main streets of shops which is called 老街, cross the bridge and look for a staircase that goes downwards. On the way you should be able to see lanes of hot spring hotels.

Upon reaching i was at first quite stunned because all of them looks like ah peh and ah ma....

but look closer, there are other young people as well.

The people there made buckets out of detergent containers and they looked clean enough to be used. We sat by this pool of hot spring water.... it was steaming hot by the sides. I tried to put my toes in and was a scalded....

Pictures of me....

you can get changed and dip urself into the hot spring but i didnt becos nobody did except the old ah ma....

so we soaked our feets in and had a hot hot dip..... I was sweating from then for the whole day.

After nearly an hour its time for food!

This is 山猪肉 that is supposedly banned in singapore. It is common in taiwan because they can hunt it from their forest. Yummy!

Back to the station after that....

Took the train to travel to our next destination. The network is simple just make sure you are waiting at the correct side of the platform.

Get down at Houshanpi station and follow the sign boards to the exit, see 胡须章 thats famous for selling 鲁肉饭 walk straight and cross the road to get to wu fen pu

!After some shopping at wu fen pu, walked towards the direction of 松山车站 and cut across and you get to Raohe night market.

3 inch burger. 1 for 19NT. Lots of flabours to choose from. Bun was soft, meat was tender.

Baked potato and tapioca. This is the first time i've eaten something like this. adding the tapioca added a sweet taste to the potato which was good. The cheese was thick and chewy and the boss was generous with ham....

The best thing of taiwan would be the fried mushrooms. I tried those from singapore shi lin. the batter was overly thick and tasteless, covered the natural juicy mushrooms' taste. Those in taiwan was much better! the batter was evenly coated, tasted real crispy, they added 五香powder to the mushrooms and it was so juicy that one bite and the juice comes spurting out!

and look at the generous portions, it was over flowing. Plus u get to choose 3 varieties of mushrooms!

Taiwan has this thick thick soup that is similar to the texture of shark fin soup. This is actually 肉羹. It has some meat balls inside with a bit of spinach, carrots, eggs. i felt it tasted more like mee sua soup without the mee sua. But nonetheless it was great! Piping hot and spicy!

We bought 1 litre milk tea that is super huge. look at the proportion! bigger than the face!

And what? Did i hear wrongly that its cheaper than KOI in Singapore?

If anyone watched 食尚玩家 hosted by shasha, she did a series on raohe night market and this is the very much raved 胡椒饼 that was recommended. It was super hot and had to be cooled down to be eaten. The skin is rather flaky and the ingredients inside had this special peppery taste that blended well with the meat and is very fragrant. I had some problems biting it though cos of braces.

We sat outside a temple to finish our food and this was wad we saw. The left over flags to put on prayer tables the day before had to be burnt.

Went back to the room, searched thru the channel and see what i found?

This show is called 学校没教的事. The girls are actually promoting sex toys! And customers get to call in to enquire things like how to use it..... omy.....

Before heading to bed i drank this, which was recommended by my taiwan fren. Its suppose to be a fibre drink to aid digestion. Drink 1 bottle of this and you will head to the toilet before the day ends.