Hua Xi, Ximending... Night Markets are Amazing

Day 17

Traveling

An uneventful day. We did lots of traveling. A flight from Beijing to Shanghai, then Shanghai back to Taipei. We did, however, ride a maglev in Shanghai to get to the airport. 30km in 8 minutes at 300km/h, which was very cool.

Day 18

Night markets and shopping.

Back in Taipei. Chandler had a dentist appointment and a dermatologist appointment today, so we got off to a slow start, but that was ok, as we got in kind of late from the airport and got to sleep in. We made a leisurely start towards the dentist and while I was waiting for Chandler to get finished, I walked around the neighborhood a bit. Not too much interesting, it was pretty standard for Taipei, and I never felt insecure. We departed to meet up with some of Chandler’s friends in Taipei. We took the MRT to somewhere further in the city and met them at a coffee shop playing where they were playing a board game. We hung out with them for a bit and took off to check out a nearby mall which was uninteresting (from my perspective – malls here are very high end).

After this we headed towards a new night market: Hua Xi. This one was cool, but we were there a bit early. This is the night market where you can see vendors kill snakes so that you can drink the blood – apparently it’s an aphrodisiac… We saw the snakes, but never saw one get killed. Apparently it’s kind of a novelty to see that anymore as it hardly ever happens. We grabbed a little something to eat, including chicken testicles, and pig intestines, and squid head, and they were all delicious. This night market had a bit of a different feel to it, which I didn’t really notice until Chandler pointed it out. Most of the time the night markets are filled young people. This one was a mix of young people and old people, and catered to a bit of a different crowd, but it was still interesting and worth a look.

From here we walked a short bit to a nearby shopping area called Ximending. This area was filled with young people, and was not really a night market, it was more like a shopping district, kind of like a big outdoor mall, but since it catered to young people, it was more affordable. It was kind of like Taipei’s version of the Nanjing in Shanghai, or Wanfujing in Beijing. We bummed around here for a while as it was quite large and hopped on the MRT to head towards Chandler’s dermatologist appointment. Luckily for me, his dermatologist’s office is right in the middle of Shi-Lin night market. Additionally weird was that his appointment was at 11:30PM. And if that isn’t weird enough, his mother moved his appointment forward by 2 hours from 1:30AM!!! Weird, right? Anyway, it worked for me, as Chandler just stopped at his dermatologist and I preceded to check out the night market. After he was done we grabbed a little something to eat, as neither of us was very hungry from the testicles, etc., and we raced to make the MRT back to Chandler’s home on the other side of town – we actually ran through a couple of the stations where we had transfers in order to make trains, but we did make it.

Gahn-Bay!

Day 19

National Palace Museum

We got up a bit early today and made our way to the National Palace Museum. Essentially the idea behind the National Palace Museum is this: The museum is full of stuff that was absconded from the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1948 during the Chinese Civil War. At the time the Capitalists were in power, and when they feared a Communist takeover of the government, they started boxing up all the nice shit and shipped it to Taiwan. So when the Communists eventually did take over, the Capitalists fled to Taiwan and the nicest items from imperial China went with them. So that’s the deal. Some of the stuff is still in the Forbidden City in Beijing, but most of the nice stuff made its way to Taiwan. So we spent about 5 hours there looking at all the collections, some of which were very impressive. The royal family definitely lived very lavishly, and the museum had many bronze items in the collection that were 10,000 years old.

After this we were a bit hungry, and we were supposed to meet up with a friend of Chandler’s. We headed to a shopping area with a giant mall, a huge ferris wheel, and a bunch of big-box stores surrounding it. We walked around there for a while and grabbed something eat. After a couple hours we decided to head back early and chill at home for the evening.

There is talk of driving to the east coast tomorrow, but I’m not really sure what will come to pass.

Gahn-Bay