Day 5: Discovering More Food in Taipei...

 ~ 18th March 2014 ~

One of the streets behind Xinshen North Road...

One should have learnt by now that not everything that's hyped up in the Internet is as good as it sounds. One of our Malay idioms perfectly described it as "Indah khabar daripada rupa". Touristy places are not always as amazing as they seemed in still shots taken by professionals. One must walk the streets to look for something that's hidden. On our way back to Miss Chen's homestay in the apartment which looks like it's gonna fall apart, I shepherded my entourage into the wrong turning. My built-in GPS in the head has no signal, total lost of connection, so I simply made a turning and they happily followed. The sight of colourful bright lights along the street raised an alarm in my head... *location unknown.... location unknown.... turn back.... turn back....* but the bright lights with lots of red and pink were calling us to move forward. There's food everywhere. On the left and on the right. Trust me, this place was not even listed as one of the places to offer street food. We studied the map of Taipei from every corner and we searched everything that's written online, but nada... no mention of this food haven.

One of the narrower streets....

The streets got narrower and narrower. You seriously need skills to manoeuvre your vehicles and many of them drove mini vans. It was quite dangerous to order food, standing beside the stall and then a few scooters would be zoom-ing by. I was not thinking of snatch thieves. It's easy to snatch handbags since the bikers would be very near the pedestrians. I have no such thought as I don't carry handbags with me. It would be a nightmare to snatch anything from me. The snatch thief would definitely fall off the machine trying to snatch my bags tangled up in a mess that I find difficult to untangle at times.

Getting supper....

I have my milk tea for supper while Pinky has her huge bowl of crab porridge. The price of food there was extremely cheap. I'm still wondering how come I didn't buy any food. The food intake for day 5 was miserably too little. By the way, it's quite easy to look for this place. It's at Xinsheng North Road, somewhere there... and you will see lots of taxis moving in and out. And yeah, that's the red light district that I saw from the room. Geylang in Singapore, also a red light district, has good food, too. 

Seafood restaurants along the main road....

We had to make a big round to walk back to our homestay. Along the road, there were more and more seafood restaurants. All the restaurants were filled to the brim. The food must be fantastic. It must have been near midnight and we were not prepared for such discovery, or we must be poor again that we couldn't afford to have more food. The fish caught in Taiwan was totally alien to me. I can't even name any of the fishes. I don't have much knowledge regarding fishes. I suppose they must be delicious and expensive? No? I don't know... We weren't that lost anymore as I could recognize the shape of the buildings which I have spent a couple of hours staring into on the first night. While we were walking back, we were verbally accusing Miss Chen behind her back for not telling us about such food haven just behind the building. If we ever go again, we will still stay at Miss Chen's place... if we go again... I'm about 99.99% sure that we won't be going again. I don't miss the country, just felt that we have missed out here and there and we should have made more detailed studies on a particular place and zoomed in on one place. Will learn from this trip to make better plans for our next trip together.

We had the television switched on the moment we walked in. While eating her porridge, we were actually planning to watch the Taiwan series from the day before but we watched news instead. Everyday, the news was about the missing MH370 followed by the tertiary students' activity in showing their disagreements with the governments. The event was just three streets away from us. We were very tired but the moment we have our fingers busy on our phones, chatting with our husbands, left behind by us in different parts of the world, we were wide awake. Oh, me the professional luggage packer, started packing all our stuff. We were moving out the next day.