day 37! zhongxiaoxinsheng, wufenpu, sanhe night market

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So....I'm woefully behind on my blog posts, and for once it's not because I've been too lazy. :( :( I've actually been too busy the last week to catch up on any of it, because I've been so busy trying to bring Kurt to all my favorite places in Taiwan. :) I still would like to keep this blog up to date though so I will try to go back and remember what I did on each day.... 

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I hadn't visited my grandmother in a while, actually not much at all, since my siblings and everyone had left so I figured I should go visit her today. It's also one of my last days to do go around aimlessly before Kurt gets here and things get all busy, so I figured afterwards I could go out and..do that stuff.

Went to the fruit market near my grandmother's house to get some fruit for us to share. She's gonna insist that we eat anyway, and fruit would be something to break the silence with, and cutting/washing up would give me something to do....so yea. Multipurpose fruit. :) There are sooo many yummy looking fruits at the market, but all the cool ones (guava, starfruit, lychee), I'm not as familiar with?? So I don't know if they're in season & ripe, cheap/expensive, or how to prepare them? So I once again settled on good ol watermelon....

Also picked up a bread to have for breakfast/lunch. :3 It looks so interesting! It's like soft asian bread with an egg on top, green onions, thin slices of sausage, and yummy bonito flakes! Alas. It was not tasty. :(

After hanging out with grandmother, went to wufenpu (the garment district) to shop, since i'd only gone that one time, back when Jennifer was still here. Here's me turning into the wufenpu area....the first thing you see at this particular entrance is a terrifying Jack Sparrow doll.

There that's a little better. :) What you see looking down one corridor (of which there are many). SO. MANY. CLOTHES.

Didn't end up getting too much because luggage space is becoming a serious concern. ^^; Especially after all those shoes. I did get one super fobby shirt though. I think it's cute! But so fob. It's just like a short sleeve mmm dress shirt?? With big puffy girly sleeves. And..there's a tie! That you button onto the short. But the way the buttonholes are cut on the tie, there is excess material between each button, so it kind of zigzags and pops out from your shirt a bit. I think it's a cute girl-meets-punk thing~ and I will never wear it. lol

Stayed there a few hours, but I had plans to meet my cousin at 10pm (she heard that I came home and felt bad that she wasn't there to hang out so she said she'd take me out later. She's so nice!) so I headed back home to drop things off. Went to a cafe called "Tommy Boy cafe" right near our apartment. It's the first coffee I've had in Taiwan! :p I miss it. Not bad, but their vanilla lattes don't taste like vanilla lattes!! Where is the vanilla?? Why don't you just sell "latte" then?!?!

Then I went back to my grandmother's station to meet up with my cuz....I had a few minutes so I took this people-watching-video for you Janet. It's sort of a long video and took aaaaaages for Google to upload. Hope it's useful, it may be a bit hard to see anything!

My cousin brought me to a new night market that I'd never heard of, I think called Sanhe night market. It's on the orange/brown line, at the Taipei Bridge stop, and she said it's the only one in that area. It is formatted somewhat like Raohe, as in a very long street with shops lining the sides and long island going down the middle, forming two columns...but it is much much narrower, and goes on for a long time. :)

We stopped right away to have these little guys. No idea what they're called! We've seen lots of vendors for them before. They're these little gummy desserts, kind of cold and light. The clear outside is unflavored gelatin, and there's flavor on the inside. Purple = red bean, pink = strawberry, green = green bean....etc. They're maybe 10 cents each, we just got a few to try. Not bad. :)

We did not eat this but it was at some stand that sold fried squid. They don't all look like that, but I think they just put this on display for advertising or something.

My cousin got a baked potato to eat, like the one we got at Shilin .

I went straight for the desserts though. There was a sign for paopaobing, which we hadn't had yet (but Michael kept mentioning it) so I had to get it!!

Paopaobing is a special kind of bing (there are many kinds), where the flavor is mixed into the bing. I wasn't quite sure what people meant when they described it before but now I know. It is essentially a slurpee. A VERY sweet slurpee. The guy spoons in a couple spoonfuls of syrup then as the grey ice machine (above) spits out ice, he mixes it with the syrup so it's all blended together.

Finished product! And it's actually even sweeter than it looks. :p It melted super fast (it's hot outside) and I tried to drink it like you would a slurpee but once the ice is not there to dampen the flavor it's like chugging straight up Torani syrup. We had to pour it down the drain. T_T I wept a little.

Cute lil toe socks for sale at the night market! We didn't end up buying anything, just got some snacks and then did some window shopping. We didn't have much time anyway, since we got there around 10:30 and last train is at 12:00...

My cousin got a different kind of bing, the topping is qingrenguo or something? lover's fruit. I heard somewhere else that it's just young mango. Not sure. It's local to Taiwan though. :)

Well after walking the length of the whoooole thing, we realized that we only had another 10 minutes or so til we had to worry about the last train, so we sprinted back down the length of it, hopped into the station and managed to grab the last one back. :) It was pretty late when I finally got home.