I hardly know where to begin, we’ve done so much and been so many places since last I posted. I’ll start with the rest of our stay in Taipei.
Taiwan, I’ve learned, is known as one of the top travel destinations in the world for shopping. As the capital, Taipei offers the whole spectrum, from high end designer department stores to the bustling crowds and street vendor fair of the night markets. I’ve been able to experience a bit of both so far on this trip.
One of the first nights we were in Taipei, we went out to a smaller night market near where we were staying, but the next night we ventured out by subway to the famous night market of Shilin, the largest in Taipei. Imagine a street fair on steroids. Blocks and blocks of vendors selling everything from cell phone cases to jewelry to shoes to electronics to umbrellas, and all of them trying to outsell and undercut each other, so prices are low. And that is saying nothing of the food stands. There you have drink vendors selling bubble tea, “frog eggs”, sugar cane juice (I had to try it, not my favorite though), and other iced refreshing drinks. The street food stands were selling various fried foods of all kinds, “stinky” tofu (the smell of that stuff kind of turned my stomach), steamed buns stuffed with meat or cabbage or bamboo shoots, shaved ice, meat skewers, fresh fruit…it kind of made me to dizzy how much there was.
It was there I finally bought my own parasol. You see, most of the women in Taiwan use “sunbrellas”, or umbrellas that are UV resistant to protect themselves from the heat of the sun. Jeff’s Mom had brought a simple one for me to use while there thinking I wouldn’t have thought to bring one but might like to use it, but once I realized how well they work, and remembering how I used to dream of having and using a parasol as a little girl, I decided I needed to find a really gorgeous one to use while here and keep as a keepsake. Jeff’s Mom and I probably spent 20 minutes at an umbrella stand haggling with the vendor (well, she did, I just listened and wished I could hear what they were were saying). He was doing full on demos of each umbrella I was interested in, jerking them around and in and out to demonstrate how they’d react to wind. At one point he even whipped out a water bottle and poured water on an umbrella to demonstrate its water repellancy. In the end, I bought it for the equivalent of just over $20 USD. Not the cheapest umbrella you’ll find, but it’s beautiful, a lavender color with a black and silver lacey overlay decorated with some sequins. I’m quite happy with it.
Jeff, on the other hand, was always stopping at the electronic stands and testing out various bluetooth speakers, and finally found some he really liked as gifts for friends. The thing that made it so hard was that there were just so many choices and so much stuff available for sale that I just sort of got desensitized to it, and it was like I couldn’t get interested in buying anything. You know when something is hard to find and not readily available it kind of makes you want it more? This was the opposite of that, there was such an overabundance of stuff for stale it was kind of mind numbing. The fun part was comparing prices between stands and feeling like we found a steal by paying the cheaper price, and finding the items you couldn’t find at other stands.
On that first night in Shilin I found these great rayon flowy pants with a stretchy wide waist band that laces up in front, perfect for the hot weather there, for about $9. I also found a rayon embroidered blouse there for a little more, but I thought it was very pretty and I was realizing that my cotton fitted T-shirts are less than ideal for the sweltering humidity.
And then there was the food. I struggled with that part a bit, because while some of it I really liked, most of it was friend and strange, and my stomach couldn’t take much of it. I liked the cold drinks a lot though!
Sunday evening, Jeff and I decided to take on Shilin ourselves, since his Mom was tired and we had kind of outlasted her the night before. We’d have to handle the bargain element on our own. I think we had more fun the second time; covered more ground, and topped the evening off with fresh mango shaved ice. If you’ve never had Taiwans mangos, you can’t really imagine what this is like, but it was pretty out of this world. Imagine a heap of ice shavings, with fresh super ripe mango piled high on top, tart green mango pieces, a scoop of ago ice cream on top, with sweet mango juice and condensed milk poured over.
I ended up with a few more gift souvenirs that night, and Jeff somehow ended up with a mission to collect the justice league in socks. It started when he found these hilarious Superman, Batman, and Spiderman socks, and then found that other stands had Iron Man, and other super heros, but not of the same style, although it appeared that all super hero were available in each style, but not all stands carried all of each. Then there was the added complication that most stands offered multiples discounts, so he kept needing to buy one more pair to get the discount. In the end he decided he needed a full set in each of the two styles of each super hero, so the later part of the evening was spent tracking down super hero socks, and in the end Jeff triumphantly emerged with 12 pairs of super hero socks, 6 each of both styles.
I forgot to mention the origin of the StarChicken! Jeff spotted this T-shirt for sale our first night at Shilin that was a spoof of the Starbucks logo, but instead said, “StarChicken Coffee” and had the head of the Kentucky Fried Chicken man instead of the Starbucks siren in the logo. StarChicken became one of our growing list of running jokes this trip, which thus far also includes “blue seater”, “Buddha Buffet,” and “temple duck.”
I’m sure we’ll be experiencing night markets again in Shanghai, so it will be interesting to compare the two, for sure.
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