Taiwan Day 2 - Taipei

The hotel has provided us with free breakfast vouchers with a choice of 3 places.  One of the places serves a traditional Taiwanese breakfast that includes congee, a gruel like mush.  Another place is 7/11.  Believe it or not the 7/11's here are very abundant and quite the lifesaver. Great for cold drinks and snacks.  The place we've been going to has decent espresso and coffee.  The cafe americano is espresso with more water added.  Sounds odd, but it works well.  With breakfast comes a hot hard boiled egg and a choice of sandwich.  Sandwiches here are different.  On white bread, they remove the crusts.  I ordered a tuna sandwich - it had about a teaspoon of tuna salad surrounded by a tiny piece of ham and some egg salad also surround by ham.  It has a piece of cucumber and a bittle of iceberg lettuse.  Odd combo but tastey nonetheless.

After breakfast we took the subway to Shillin and then a taxi ride to the National Palace Museum. The museum houses rare antiquities from the mainland primarily that some emperor secreted away to protect it from plunder.  Nice building, 3 levels, lots of old stuff.  Two of the highlights were the nested balls carved from ivory sometime in the late 1800's - we have a cheap copy we bought on our first trip to Beijing.  They other highlight was a beautiful carving of jade that was made to look like a stalk of Bok Choy.  The jade stalks are white while the leaves are darker green.  Amazing how the artist took a weird piece of stone and made something that people are familiar with.  Really cool and beautiful.

After the museum we took a taxi ride to a world famous dumpling house.  They have now over 20 of these shops around SE Asia and even one in California.  While waiting we placed our order.  Once inside we were ushered to the 3rd floor - very clean and upscale.  The dumplings were quite varied - served with shredded ginger a bit of soy and some vinegar.  We ordered a bunch of dishes along with their special appetizer of tofu, and shredded bean sprouts, vermicelli aand other stuff.  Also order sauted Taiwanese lettuce as a side dish.  Ate dumplings along with a cold beer.  Meal came in at around $1,500 or $US46.  Expensive as lunch goes but well worth it.

Afterwards we walked to a subway station to go to Longshan Temple.  

While we've been to many temples in Beijing, this one was quite special.  Built in the mid 1700's it is  still quite active.  When we arrived a "service" was in full swing.  People lighting incense and chanting buddist prayers in unison:

After walking around some (it's very small) we took a seat of observe the ceremony.  I found it fasinating.  The chanting reminded me of the Jews davening as a result of the repetitious chanting.  The chanting seemed to put people into a meditative state.  Sort of like TM does.  It was quite hot and humid so sweat was dripping off me, even while sitting quietly.  Strangely the Taiwanese seem to take it in stride and even look like they weren't sweating.

Video of Buddhist Chanting to be inserted later

After a while we wandered outside the temple and went into a juice lace for a cold drink.  Brad had a watermelon juice which was quite good and I had a lemon juice, which was just like our lemonade.  very refreshing.  what was interesting though is the shop was selling a shaved ice dish that looked really good.  Not crushed ice, it was shaved and had a fluffyness to it similar to snow.  They put a bunch of it into a bowl and then add different fruits, sweetened beans and we think a bit of condensed milk.  It looked very refreshing and lots of people were ordering it.  It's on our list of must try things.   Here's one Brad had in Hualien:

Bet if it was brought to the US and modified some for US tastes, it would be a real hit in the warm weather markets.  Remember, you heard it here first!

It was just before 5pm so we went back to our hotel for a break and to figure out the rest of our trip.  By 7pm we headed out to the Shillin Market.  We were there the night before but never found the stand alone food court I had seen on Zimern's show.  The night before we wandered the streets, enjoying some snacks but this was different.

Here's what we ended up eating:  We started with a few grilled sausages on a stick.  Quite good.  Then Brad tricked me into eating stinky tofu:

While the smell is absolutely vile, it was actually okay to eat.  It was served with a sauce and cabbage.  Then we tried Squid and bamboo shoot soup.  

Soup was good as were the bamboo shoots.  Squid was tough and well squidy and chewy.  Not my favorite.  

We shared a dish of cold sesame spicy noodles - good.

Then had a burrito of something really weird.  

Crunchy that was smashed, added chopped peanuts and then roll into a tortilla.  

It was just fair.   We order a jelled fig juice drink. 

I was expecting it to taste like sweet figs.  We think it was a tea made from the leaves of a fig tree.  Weird and gelatinous.  But it did help the dry crunchy burrito go down.  We walked around the market and came upon snails:

 Gave a plate of them a try.

Left there afterwards and went to a nice section of the city Zhongxiao Dunhua to check out the bar scene.  Much nicer more upscale.  We ended up in a cafe, sat and enjoyed a few beverages.  Subway shuts down at midnight so we made our way back to hotel and set up to watch Brin's opening ceremony in Israel.

Day 2 ended around 2am.