Night Markets - March 28 and 29, 2016

My first day of work in Taipei didn't go great in terms of productivity, but I really enjoyed meeting my coworkers. Lunch was late, with the four of us that weren't part of a client team out for noodles and a mix of other little dishes, including slightly spicy sautéed tofu.

I polled my coworkers for ideas for the evening, and we came up with the Raohe Street Market. A twenty minutes metro ride, and a line for peppered pork buns about the same length. 

Have I mentioned how much I love Taiwan? I showed up for the first week of beautiful weather that they've had this month. The view from the office includes the surrounding mountains. And then, there's the food. 

So, the pork bun was just a start. The amount of food was so overwhelming, I decided that the only things I would try were things that had lines. 

And apparently, bun-shaped things. After the pork bun was a fried mochi ball. 

Then were these mochi balls with crushed peanuts. Those were the best.

 

Well, but then I had to try the stinky tofu. It was fried, but the air around the stall was a bit pungent. A bubble tea (though don't ever get one with red bean bubbles - original tapioca pearls are way better) was the final selection for the evening. 

Don't worry, I did slightly more than just go to another night market on Tuesday. I climbed up Elephant Mountain!

The view over Taipei, specifically of Taipei 101, was definitely worth the twenty minutes of stairs. 

I'm still not positive if I got to the lookout that I was supposed to get to (another case of following ambiguous "go left at the split" when there were a couple different forks in the road), but I got some pretty nice pictures, so I was happy. 

And hungry - more night markets! I walked from the Xinyi Anhe station down through the Tonghua Street night market, that merged pretty seamlessly into the Linjiang Street market. 

Ready for the foods of Linjiang? First, these amazing sweet potato balls with seaweed sprinkled on them. Well, I guess first was actually this Chinese sandwich that I got with peanut sauce, but it was kinda dry, so we'll skip that one. 

We had had a long discussion at lunch (a great office meal with everything from roast chicken to cabbage to tofu to baked fish) about fruits in Taiwan, which really just resulted in me wanting to try all of them, especially "star fruit."

Well, I didn't actually have that, but I had custard fruit, which was amazing.

 

And these cross between an apple and a pepper called wax apples. It actually mirrors both those fruits pretty closely - crispy but a mild, just barely sweet flavor. 

Bianca and Vida had been encouraging me to try a foot massage, so after my walk up a mountain, I figured they deserved it. 

My feet got a nice hot soak to start with. Then, the massage was really tickle-y for about two minutes before she started kneading my sole, then calves. The pants I was wearing were too tight to roll up, so I had this ridiculous pair of floral pajama shorts. 

I bought a cheesecake to eat at home, but the final stall as I was leaving had a line for dumplings. Well, if there was a line, then I had to get in it! She wouldn't sell me just one, so five started on the trip home with me. Only one was left when I made it back to the hotel.