Thanks to Jah suggesting that I go out and get actual breakfast for breakfast, I looked up some porridge stores near me and found a nearby roadside stall that seemed interesting, although most of their positive reviews praised their noodles rather than their porridge. Nonetheless, it looked cheap and good and I decided to go get both. It was nice and windy as I stepped out of the lodging that I was staying in, crossing a couple of roads and past the market with all the late-night stalls yesterday (they were all missing in action this morning) to my targeted stall, named Ah Lian Canteen. It looked like this from the outside:

Just a store on the diagonal of a road intersection. There were all of two tables in this little store, one outside in front of the store and one inside behind the stall itself, and the outside table was already occupied by two old chatty women when I got there, so she invited me to sit in the inside one. This also gave me a nice view of her stall as she made the large bowl of Preserved Egg and Lean Meat Porridge that I had asked for:

About halfway through my meal, a guy pulled up on a motorcycle which was loaded down with gas canisters for the stove. I got to witness him bringing the new one in and carrying the old replaced gas canister out, and the proprietress paying him for the gas.

When the food was nearly done, I said that it was great and asked to get some of the noodles anyway, to go. She duly made me a small bowl, which I brought back to my lodging.

She only charged me 130 yuan for both together, or slightly over $5 CAD. She asked if I was full, I said yes, and she said that even though I had ordered a large bowl of the Preserved Egg and Lean Meat Porridge, she had only given me a small one because that was what she felt was closer to what I could eat instead. The bowl of Pig’s Large Intestine Noodles she gave me for my take-out order was a large, though. They looked exactly the same to me, but hey, that saved me 15 yuan. And I devoured it shortly after returning to my lodging.

Both dishes were nice, neither one was the best porridge or noodle I had ever had but they were indeed satisfying, especially when I added pepper to the porridge, whose broth was neither too thick nor too thin/watery. The noodles were thin and short and reminded me sort of like a Singapore dish, mee sua. And judging by the Wikipedia article, that’s exactly what it was. I’m just more used to seeing that dish in a clear broth.

I did a bunch of work tickets through the morning, catching up and finishing “tomorrow’s” work tickets, though the delineation between work days are kind of fluid due to timezones. I had a weekly check-in meeting with my boss at 10 pm, so I wanted to get work out of the way and then set aside a chunk of time for going out and wandering, which I did starting from about 2pm onwards. As I hadn’t had lunch yet, finding that was the first order of the day, but I didn’t have anything in particular in mind, so I brought up a few landmarks on the Taipei city map in Google Maps and started walking towards them from my hotel room. My entire afternoon-evening walk took nearly 6 hours — it was 6.6 miles over 6 hours and 5 minutes, according to Google Maps, but that counts the morning bit for breakfast as well. Google (and Pikmin Bloom) says I did 23,014 steps today, while Samsung Health, ever the contrarian, says I did 23,174 steps.

Today’s weather was great, it was warm but also very windy for a good chunk of the day (as it was yesterday as well), and I no longer had any uncomfortable blisters or mouth/tongue cuts/ulcers (although the latter doesn’t exactly affect walking, it irritates me) so it was nice to just let loose and do some urban exploration. I just spent the day wandering, not particularly caring exactly where I went although I had a few vague goals in mind, and I ended up walking basically across nearly a third of Taipei City’s north-south width, I think, and I visited so many places a little bit today that I’m not going to even list them in the summary section in the table of contents above, as they would never fit. Instead, I’ll just name a couple of the more memorable ones in chronological order.

My route for the day looked something like this map below, with the walk first taking me all the way to the northernmost point, before I took a bus back down south to the messy middle region, and then took a bus back down south again to get home.

My first standout find of the day was a small, T-shaped shopping street, very similar to the Japanese shoutengai ones but with a much narrower pedestrian passage, though that didn’t dissuade the occasional motorcycle from passing through. It was a covered street, but Google Maps called it Qingguang Shopping District or Qingguang Market and said that it was a night market. There were some food carts outside the shopping street so maybe that part of it might be a night market, but I don’t think the extremely long row of shops in Qingguang Market itself counts as a night market. Just a regular market. Even Google lists some of the shops’ closing times as 2:00 pm and 8:00 pm.

The stalls outside Qingguang Market looked like this:

And the actual sheltered market inside looked like this:

This blouse.. this made me want to start a segment where I just find an outlandish picture, post it on my daily travel blog, and make the only caption I give it a “Huh.” What even were they trying to say with “You’re Lickchcice”? And what is that character above the first c? What does any of this even mean?

Huh?

While I was wrestling with my puzzlement, I ran into a food store that sold (and specialized in — it was their only dish) Hainanese Chicken Rice, a very popular and very nice Singapore dish. This made me want to try out and see how it compared, so I ate lunch here. The rice and chicken came with side dishes, from which I could pick two of seven.

I picked the Century Egg Tofu and the Nyonya Acar Seaweed, and the meal was served almost immediately — they apparently had most of it already prepared since they were a one-trick shop.

The rice and chicken were nice enough, the two sides were whatever, but the actual standout here was the corn and carrot soup, it was amazing and I want to try to make it once back at home now.

The shop itself was one long table in the middle of the room with stools along the side, that bit of it was interesting too.

After lunch, I walked on north, passing two dog friends who must have recently fought since they weren’t talking to each other anymore.

My next interesting find came when passing a school called Tatung University, as I saw little white tents in there by a fountain just behind the wall dividing the school grounds from the street outside, and an opened gate that was practically beckoning me in. And who am I to turn down an invitation?

It turned out to be just a tiny gathering of food trucks and external vendors though, not some sort of school festival like I had hoped. Or well, it sort of was, it was the 3rd day of a graduation ceremony thing and the 3rd day was specifically for external vendors to come in and set up shop for some reason. The student response was about as tepid as mine was. Like next to things like cookie stalls, there were two booths with camera/photography gear laid out and on display. Who the heck is going to buy that as a recent University grad?

Sauntering on, I got to Taipei Expo Park, which I had to first walk alongside for a bit, then cut through to get to a bridge that would take me across a river.

I passed by some phone booths (Taipei still has a good number of phone booths! And they still seem to take phone cards! I briefly used to collect phone cards…) and saw a number of little books on them, and after inspecting them found out that they were free and left at different phones as some sort of weird free advertising. I probably will never get around to it, but I took a couple with the idea that I would eventually scan and upload them onto the Internet Archive or something. Especially since one of them was a Buddhist thing entitled (after translation) Introduction to the Vajra Prajna Paramita Sutra. The other one was some sort of fictional short story.

This sign also made me go “Huh.” Taipei Collectible Botanical Garden? Dancing Butterfly Inclusive Playground? Who came up with these names/translations?

This bear was cheering me upon my journey.

I also ran into a flock of pigeons being fed by a kid while two old men watched on. It reminded me of this Memory Snippet.

Very nice. There was also a colourful temple that I passed by on my way to the other side of the park.

I was also amused by this police car parked next to anti-police graffiti.

Past the park, I came across a steamed bun (bao) shop selling a variety of buns. There was a small queue there and they were cheap, so I joined the queue and picked up two baos:

The first one was Braised Lion Bun or maybe Braised Lion Head Bun (it didn’t actually contain lion, that’s just the name of it):

It had either curry vegetables or acar seaweed or something like that in it and was interesting but close to average at best.

The second one was Longan Brown Sugar Steamed Bun:

It was horrid because there was basically no filling at all inside of it, it was just bread that was mildly flavoured like longan (a fruit that I do like) with tiny chunks of something or other scattered between the bread. Yuk. I had to go buy some tea from a store after that to wash it down.

While eating those buns, I crossed an overhead bridge, got inundated by the flow of a bunch of middle or high school students headed in the opposite direction, went under a highway, then crossed another bridge over a large river. I don’t have much of a commentary on these pictures so they instead will get stuffed unceremoniously into a gallery here.