Day 54-58 Pt 1-Taiwan

DAY 54 AND EVERY EVENING/NIGHT OF OUR TRIP

MY 1ST PICTURES in Taiwan are those of the airport bus. If you think I have an inexplicable fascination with transportation, I think you may be right. What with the Shatabdi Express in India, and then my palace camels and now, the Taipei airport buses known as "Fei Gou" or "Flying Dogs". It must surely be the curtains for my immediate thought when I saw them was "dollhouses!" And so of the 1371 pictures I took in Taipei, 1346 of them were of the exhibits in MMoT (Miniature Museum of Taiwan) and 3 of them were of this bus. Remarkable percentage considering I only took 25 "any-other-pictures."

Riding into Taipei city and watching the roads from the unobstructed front row seats of these buses was the perfect way to begin my trip. I knew then that I was going to love Taiwan.

Ser, Sandy and I (yes, amazingly, all our names start with "S"), excited and sleepless, spent our 1st night roaming the streets by visiting a night market. Taipei's night markets are so famous for their "xiaochi" or "snacks" that we have many shops selling "Shilin Xiaochi " right here in Singapore. That night, I tried the legendary stinky toufu on a skewer and fell head over heels. Sandy thought it smelt like sh$% and I thought how wonderful, now I can have them all to myself! I think I should order some of these from Kiva's Kitchen for Maya to shoo away the Prince's unwanted attention sometimes.

Night markets were how we spent ALL the nights in Taipei and on Saturday evening, we even went to 2 of them, the last being Shilin which is more than a hundred years old. If you should spend every single day of your life in Shilin, eating from a different stall for each and every meal, you still would not have tried all of them. For you mini food lovers, what a field day you will have trying to make all the food sold there and they should be real easy to make. Here's some very famous ones:

Pig's Big Intestine & Oyster With Chinese Fine Vermicelli In Gooey Soup (our all time favourite):

Small Intestine Wrapped in Big Intestine with Oily Sticky Rice:

Chunky Duck's Blood in Numbing Spicy "Mah-Lah" Herbal Soup:

I picked the ones with aphrodisiac values to feature here and with that I hope to whet your appetite for more of Taipei to come.

I wish I can post the pictures of all the mini things I bought from Taipei for my palace but alas, the task is as daunting as sorting the pictures I took at the MMoT . (Nonetheless, I hope to post at least 1300 of them in my Projects Blog.)

There will also be some treasures I have acquired for the Palace from the National Palace Museum which will need to be recorded here. You will find out soon enough what they are.