Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Taipei Day 2: Taipei Story House, Jiufen & Northeast Coast, Raohe Night Market

Read about Day 1 of my Taipei trip here.

As all of you know I'm a Giveaway Queen™, and by some stroke of luck I won us a tour to Jiufen and the Northeast Coast of Taiwan through Klook, yay!!! The tour was only scheduled to begin at around 1pm with a pickup at our hotel, so to make the most of our day we woke up early to squeeze in a visit to a garden maze and the nearby Taipei Story House, an old Tudor house which is now a museum.

~ Garden maze at Xinsheng Park ~


I randomly found this garden maze when scrolling through Google Maps while doing research for the trip (that's how I do travel research sometimes). I don't know why but I love garden hedge mazes. Or maybe I like the idea of them because they're something you'd find in an English garden in a storybook - like in Alice in Wonderland or The Secret Garden. I mean I know that in reality they're just blocks of vegetation but...just let me live out my fake ang moh land fantasies okay??



The hedge maze was pretty standard, we went in there just to get lost and find our way out again, quite pointless if you think about it HAHA. The entrance area has a focal point of sorts where the hedge is lower and we took a couple of photos there. I happened to see all these Taiwanese people on Instagram "standing" on the bushes to get their photos, and only when we got there ourselves did I realise they were standing on some concrete platform thing. Like duh you can't stand on a bush right it'd just break under your weight even if you weigh as little as me.



This park is near Songshan Airport and we got to see some planes soaring above us! Even caught some in our photos.



And here's Nicholas being a weirdo:




Eww a monster!




Random bridge we happened to encounter in the vicinity. I thought the metal structure and grid patterns on the ground were cool.


An actual candid shot

~ Taipei Story House ~



Next we walked over to Taipei Story House, another attraction I randomly round on Google Maps. I LOVE LOVE LOVE old English architecture which was the main reason why I was excited to visit this place. It looked so beautiful and grand in pictures and reviews said that there were cool exhibits inside - one of them mentioned a traditional sweet exhibition.



ALAS, IT WAS ALL SEVERELY UNDERWHELMING. Taipei Story House, more like Taipei Scam House!!! Don't bother making the trip down specially for it, but maybe you'd wanna pop by and just check out the surroundings if you happen to be going to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum nearby.

Wooden stuff


Okay you can't deny that the house is pretty but it was rather small. Most disappointingly, the exhibit inside at the time was some boring traditional woody thing which I had zero interest in. We could have gone through the whole thing in like 5 minutes BUT THEN there was this annoying overly helpful guide who wouldn't stop talking and talking and talking. Okay I know she was just doing her job but CAN'T YOU TELL WHEN PEOPLE WANNA GET AWAY FROM YOU. And it's not like the house is very big so just give us our space to walk around and explore whatever little there is to explore??

And then this stupid Nicholas is another one, he's the kind of person who will entertain annoying people who can't shut up (eg rambly old taxi drivers, said museum guide) SO SHE TRULY DID NOT STFU! Finally after 10 years he noticed my boredom and irritation and told her that we'd walk around ourselves and thank goodness she didn't follow us up the stairs phew.



After that ordeal at Taipei Scam House we found this little playground nearby. Nothing much, just sat there to rest for a bit and took some photos but not before Nicholas fell off the swing and skinned his hip :(

Random rattan installation we encountered while passing by Taipei Fine Arts Museum







Your gaping anus

~ Ah Zong Mian Xian ~


Cabbed back to Ximending and had the famous Ah Zong Mian Xian (aka Ay Chung Flour Rice Noodle) for lunch. Don't be put off by the seeming long queues, it moves very quickly. And the noodles were SO GOOD, I do like the Shihlin mee sua in Singapore but wow this was like 5 times better!!!


I saw lumps of "meat" floating around inside and I asked Nicholas, "This isn't pig intestine right?". He ching chong ling long-ed with the guy at the stall in complicated Chinese words I couldn't understand, and eventually turned to me and said, "Yeah, it's not intestine. It's some other part of the pig."

I don't know why but in my stupid little mind, "some other part" = not innards.

But guess what.

On our last night there, he revealed that it was in fact PIG STOMACH. WTF!!! HOW DARE HE TRICK ME?!?!! I promptly transferred all of it from my bowl to his and ate just the noodles.

Okay to be fair it didn't taste BAD but I'm really not a fan of innards of any sort (unless it's foie gras) and I CAN'T BELIEVE HE BLUFFED ME!!!!! See this is why I'm a psycho girlfriend with trust issues!!!

~ Jiufen & Northeast Coast Tour~


Bitou Cape, Nanya Rock Formations, and Yin Yang Sea


Our guide for the tour was an English-speaking fellow and rolled up to our hotel right on time.We were hoping that we'd be the only 2 people attending the tour but our mini van had about 4 other people. But it was a small group and people mostly kept to themselves so it was nice and peaceful.



First we went to to Bitou Cape (pic above) which was along the coastal area about an hour's drive from central Taipei. We literally stopped by there for 5 minutes, plus another 5 minutes for a pee session. It would have been nice to be able to climb down to the rocky area below to get closer to the sea but oh well.




Nanya Rock Formations was my favourite coastal spot of the lot. The rocks had these really special liney patterns and the waters were SO blue!!! This odd-shaped rock (above) is what they call the "Taro Rock", for obvious reasons.

LOOK AT ALL THE BLUE WATER!!!!!





The Yin Yang Sea or Bay of Two Colours was just so-so, you can see the double-coloured effect of the sea but it's not very apparent, and even less so in photos.



Our guide wasn't a great photographer, but he was very enthusiastic about helping us take pictures. He was also very enthusiastic about Keelung Mountain and would point it out everywhere we went. So here's a picture of us with Keelung Mountain in the distance.

Before I edited the pic the mountain was barely visible so yay me. Also, my cleavage looks good. ;)

Jiufen




Finally it was time for Jiufen, the place which inspired the setting of Spirited Away. It really does look like what you see in the anime, except there are no bathhouses there of course. We were given 40 minutes to walk around on our own, so we trawled the crowded alleys and stopped here and there for food.

AMAZING BEEF NOODLES the chilli was also really good.



I didn't have high expectations for this peanut roll ice cream thing because the combination just sounds meh to me, but decided to give it a try anyway because all the Taiwan food guides say it's a must-try. It's basically a popiah skin of sorts with peanut shavings, CORRIANDER (?!), and two scoops of pineapple ice cream, which sounds like it might be a disaster for your tastebuds...but it was surprisingly yummy! Glad we didn't give this a miss. That big block of brown stuff you see there is made of peanuts, and the guy scrapes off a chunk on the spot for each roll.


Wild boar sausage! Yum. Might sound gross to some but if you really think about it, a wild boar is just the pig's hairier cousin. It's like the cavemen of  pigs. Just a pig that lives in the wilderness.


There was a store or mini museum type thing selling a lot of weird masks, but you have to pay to go in. Snuck this photo while being told off by the owner for brandishing my camera without paying.

I love Jiufen it's so quaint, I'll let the pic spam do the talking:










WE WEREN'T READY!!!!!!!!!! LOOK AT OUR FACES HAHAHAHA.
We did manage to get a better 2nd picture but we look like shit so I'm not gonna bother posting it here. You can feast your eyes on the view sans us instead:


ANIMALS OF JIUFEN


Taiwan is a very pet-friendly place, and we saw so many dogs (and one cat) at Jiufen that they deserve a section to themselves.

Fatty


It was sleeping in this strange position on a ledge! How is that even comfy??

I don't fancy animals in clothing but I really love Pomeranians so here you go


3 sleeping potatoes!!!

One potato has risen!!

The people in Taiwan are really so nice. A random guy saw me trying to catch the attention of this dog but I couldn't do it very well since my hands were full, so he distracted it on my behalf. It didn't look straight at the camera but at least it had its chin up!

Turns out there was a fourth black and white potato hiding at the back!

All in all I would say that the tour a little rushed, especially for the nature spots since we only got to spend like 5 minutes at each of them, but without it we wouldn't have caught any of those amazing sights at all cos they're all pretty far out. There's probably no way you can reach those areas via public transport. In fact, before the tour giveaway I didn't know that most of those spots existed.

The Jiufen free-and-easy was about 40-minutes long, which was enough for us to experience the heart of the activity there and try a good amount of food. But it still wasn't enough for us to explore EVERY nook and we had to move fast. But as a first-time visitor to all the places, I'm really glad we had this tour because even getting to Jiufen would have proved difficult for us noobs (it's not the most accessible). Overall the entire thing was a good experience, and it helped that the mini van was super comfy to sleep in.

I do hope that in the future we can visit Jiufen more leisurely and go to one of its little tea houses!

~ Raohe Street Night Market ~



We planned to visit a different night market every single night because we wanted to be able to experience as much as possible. Turns out Raohe Street Night Market, which we went to first, was the best of the lot. It's the biggest night market in Taipei but it's also very orderly and the paths are wide so you won't feel like you're suffocating - even if a horde of noisy Chinese tourists tries to hog the whole space.

First order of business: sweet potato wedges with plum powder! Yum.

Nicholas is more adventurous than me so when we passed by this PIG'S BLOOD CAKE stall he simply had to stop and try it. Well it's not so much of a cake than it is a lump of glutinous stuff, but in Mandarin it's called 猪血糕.





VERDICT: IT WAS LIKE SAVOURY MOCHI


Surprisingly it wasn't gross or smelly at all!!! You'd imagine it to be dripping in blood like a used tampon but all the blood is already cooked into a rectangular glutinous lump. It was coated in ground peanut and coriander and some sauce. Interesting.

Raohe was also where we both tried smelly tofu for the very first time!

VERDICT: I LOVED IT!!!!!!!!! The chilli was pretty lethal as well, which was GREAT.

He did not love it though HAHA.

Here's a picture of me with my favourite smelly tofu...oh, and a nice bowl of Taiwanese street snacks :P

After this I tried at least 3 other smelly tofu stalls around Taipei, but this was still hands down the BEST.


The stall had little stools behind it for customers to sit on and the owner was very friendly. She was very happy to hear that our virgin chou dou fu experience was at her stall haha.


Beef cubes! I'm such a pro I managed to capture the fire blaster in action. Love this camera so much.


CUTE TOY POODLE! I love how so many Taiwanese just walk along the streets pushing their doggies in prams.

I thought the colours were pretty. Why is the water blue?? Food colouring??? ._.