Taiwan Day 4 continued
Ok seems like wordpress has some problems with resizing images so i have to resize them before uploading.
After a whirlwind tour of Alishan, we hightailed out of there and headed to Taichung where we hoped to spend at least some time exploring the nightmarket there.
Unfortunately as you can see the sun was setting fast.
More train shots because I just love sitting in the train.
Railway crossings. So quaint.
I don’t know why, but we found the bento and the instant food stuff to be like better that the street snacks. The train bento is a must try, the ingredients change from trip to trip. Heres’ a photo of our second bento but we had better luck with our first.
Once we reached taichung we realised that the visitor arrival centre was closed. Because we haven’t booked any places to stay in Taichung in advance, we were royally screwed. Luckily it turned out to be a blessing in disguise as we found a hotel within 100 metres of the railway station. And what a lucky find it was. It was only slightly more expensive than a hostel stay (i think it was 1300 yen or slightly more than 50 dollars) yet had way better facilities (lan cable you can pull from the wall, touchscreen operated controls, universal socket, wall mounted lcd tv, and a nice comfy bed). Granted it was small, but it was pretty high tech. Travelling taiwan on a budget and in comfort is definitely doable during off peak periods like weekdays.
On our way to fengjia night market. Shawn’s no2 amateur tip for taking photographs – if you have to choose between overexposing or underexposing a photograph, underexpose most of the time. When you overexpose a photograph there is no way to recover the highlights that have been lost. Case in point, in most daylight shots the sky is always the first to blow becoming all white. There’s little you can do to avoid that because you want the subject of your shot to be better lit but if you underexpose the photograph, you can always bump up the brightness in photoshop and keep a bit of the sky. The tradeoff is there will be a little noise. Shawn’s no1 amateur tip? Take lots of photographs LOL.
Fengjia night market itself. Wish I had a better photo. For the first 2 hours, we were so kuku that we explored the fengjia food market without going into the main one because there were few directions. More youngsters frequent fengjia as compared to the other night markets we went to. It felt more vibrant and hip. Our first food stop:
Live bbq prawns. They would take the prawns from the tanks, skewer them and place them on the grill while they were still alive. That was followed by coating the prawns with some MSG powder. HOW CAN YOU GO WRONG WITH THAT. Apparently you can because the prawns weren’t very good. Maybe they were too small.
The second item we ate was big sausage eat small sausage, a huge sausage wrapped in a rice burger bun. Apparently the small sausage was so small because I couldn’t taste it, but it wasn’t bad.
Our third item was this monstrosity.
That’s mashed potato covered with cheese, ham, bacon, pineapples, and spinach. HOW CAN YOU GO WRONG WITH THAT?!?!? Apparently you can, cos it was meh. I guess we had too high expectations of it.
Next, chou tou fu. It was part of my contractual obligations. Normally I wouldn’t touch anything that smelt that bad because of my highly sensitive reaction to nausea-inducing things (which applies to everything else except myself). Humans have highly evolved smell mechanisms for one reason and one reason only. THINGS THAT SMELL BAD ARE BAD FOR YOU. But ok it wasn’t that bad la. Nothing to get me to eat it again however.
After this, we kinda lost our appetite for photo-taking of food so i forgot what we did but we eventually found out we were going the wrong way and were directed towards the main area which was more clothes friendly.
Lots of helmets for the scooter crazed chicks in Taiwan. (for yeow – PATRICK)
Final shot of the day. In a world of Chinese, speak English.
