Today we went for a hike at Youth Park with our neighbors, Samuel and Christine. The mountain was only a 15 minute drive from our apartment and the entire hike just took an hour and a half or so. Up until recently it's been too hot to go hiking (and Taiwan has a lot of awesome trails) but the humidity hasn't been too bad lately so it was a perfect day to go. It was a good bit of exercise, the trail was well-developed and there was some nice scenery on the way up.
The way up involved all these stairs! It wasn't as bad as maybe it looks.
We saw some local insects on our hike. I thought this butterfly looked pretty cool with his black and blue coloring.
This spider was the size of my head! And I have a big melon-head!
Samuel said that there's a man who hikes to the top of the mountain at 3am every morning to make tea for all the climbers who will visit over the day. He doesn't get paid for this or anything, it's just something he likes to do. What a good guy- does he make coffee too? In the shelter at the top, regular hikers leave their own cups in plastic bags (see the above picture) so they can enjoy some tea after their climb. There was also a lady selling dumplings at the top of the mountain, so we had some of those as well.
After spending the afternoon reading and doing some lesson planning, we caught a ride with Samuel and Christine into Taipei to visit the Linjiang Street Night Market, which is right next to the Taipei 101. They were supposed to be visiting Samuel's parents' for supper but instead they decided to show us around and eat a secret supper with us before going for supper number 2.
We had rice noodle soup, a side of tofu (AKA "dofu" in Taiwan) with a really nice sauce, a plate of pig intestines and a plate of pig cheeks. I don't know how they get us to try this stuff, but for some reason it's becoming kind of fun to eat these weird things we know we'll never get the chance to try again when we eventually leave Taiwan. The intestines were really chewy but didn't taste offensive in any way, and the cheeks just tasted like pork. If you're really interested in trying intestines this was the place to go, because the stand we went to prepared them 4 different ways. Viva la choice!
All it took was a simple "what is this?" before our neighbors scooped up a big bag of them for us to try. The black things are a shell and you break them open to eat some type of nut or maybe vegetable? They kind of tasted like a cross between a string bean and a potato. I prefered the cheeks.
Next I sampled something a bit more recognizable: some mini chicken burgers! I tried a mexican burger and a thai lemongrass burger. They were $19 NT (60 cents) each.
Mel had an oyster pancake. It's made of oysters (obvs), pancake batter, eggy, and glutonous rice with a delicious thick, savoury orange sauce. $50 NT ($1.30)
My favorite snack of the night (we also got some cream-filled cakes and a candy-covered fruit skewer but had a brain fart when it came to taking pictures) was an ice cream springroll! The guy who made it had a cube of peanut brittle on his cart about the size of a cinderblock, which he shaved and layered on a wrap made of rice paper. Then, three scoops of ice cream were added with some fresh cilantro and it was wrapped up. It was absolutely awesome... can't wait to have this again! $40 NT ($1.10)
So- Mike, Caroline- sorry we were late Skyping with you tonight. As you can tell we were incredibly busy eating intestines. I'm sure you understand- it happens all the time to the best of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment