I didn’t go out until the afternoon again today, except for morning breakfast, since my neighbourhood has a lot of small shops suitable for breakfast exploration. In fact, I found a little buffet place called Shang Ding Taiwan Buffet while prowling for breakfast today, and I was very happy with this find.

I loaded up a little bowl with stuff, including something that looked like noodles, and then found out that I could have a rice option at the end as well. Double carbs in the morning! Okay. There was no visible price tag, so I was worried, but I didn’t see them either looking at what was actually in the box or actually weighing what was in the box, so I’m thinking they charge per box instead of per vegetable or meat dish in the box. The box and rice came out to 140 NTD, or just under 6 CAD today, which I thought was pretty decent. I brought it back to the lodging to chew on.

Because it’s a buffet with a bunch of different items, and part of this time was me figuring out the system, I will probably break my “one meal per restaurant” rule for a few days here because it’s the only breakfast buffet place in my area and I’m intrigued.

I hung around in my hotel room after that until lunch time, doing work and resting from the previous day and writing down that long and painful blog entry with over 100 pictures. I don’t want to know how many typoes are still in that one. Once I got all that done and was ready to venture out again, the morning had transitioned into the very early afternoon, and it was nearing time for lunch. I had a vague plan for the day, which was to walk east from my lodging toward a night market rather than north like I did the previous day. I did indeed do something like this in the end, walking east for about maybe 1/3 the east-west length of Taipei City rather than north-south like I did yesterday.

I didn’t find nearly as many interesting things today though, which is probably a blessing for the blog, and I didn’t take as many steps either, going down from 23,014 steps to 20,261 steps. Still over 20k though, which is always a nice benchmark to hit. But I did find a nice Malaysian store for lunch not terribly long after starting my trek east, so I had lunch there, at Face to Face Noodle House.

That dish was Prawn Pan Mee, and it was 195 MTD. I didn’t appreciate there not being a separate bowl to throw/spit my prawn shells into, and the metal tables were weird, but I did appreciate the complimentary cold water flask with some sort of flavouring in there, possibly sugar cane or something, I’m not sure, plus the ability to choose my preferred colour of spoons and chopsticks from a large pile of pastel-coloured utensils. I somehow found that to be pleasing.

Anyway, some of the more notable things that my post-meal journey east took me past include this incredible mess of a shopfront:

This random Toronto Catholic District School Board thing in the middle of Taipei City for some reason:

An old woman pulling along/driving along two carts with what looked like stuff being brought to a recycling center.

Here’s a pegasus thing outside Taipei International Airport:

I ended up walking alongside this airport for some time, but it was flanked by a wall and so it turned out to not be a particularly interesting view at all. I did pass a gate and a security guard that looked like an army soldier at some point, and she looked at me quizzically as I innocently sauntered on by.

I passed at least two separate sets of people burning paper money to their ancestors today, and tried to snap a picture of the second one. It didn’t come out particularly well, but there’s a table there with the paper money on it and a little furnace behind the table that they were feeding the money into.

This is a random park with a very weird front structure:

And a narrow alleyway between two buildings with ground floor shopfronts but that were mostly residential that tempted me to walk down it (but I resisted):

This shop was closed, but its dog owner peered out at the world from behind the door.

And I just liked the colour and architecture of this building, so it got a picture and some space on Jah‘s file server too.

This was a recycling place that I got to much later on, and I guess was where the earlier woman with two carts was probably ultimately headed to. A little ways beyond it, I also passed a woman wheeling a smaller cart with a bunch of cardboard on it toward this shop.

Gas stations actually seem really rare in Taipei City, or at least I hadn’t really remembered passing and noticing them before, but I did pass and look at this NPC Petrol Station, which unlike its North American and even Japanese and Singapore counterparts, did not seem to have an embedded shop in it. There was a gas station attendant filling up a car at one of the pumps though, so it was at least a manned gas station.

Or maybe that second level thing on the left was a shop? It didn’t seem that way to me though, and still doesn’t. Just some public washrooms and stuff.

Next up, here’s a sneaky snapshot of a traffic cop pulling over a hapless driver.

And not far on, some really funky-looking roads and overpasses that caught my fancy.

Soon after, I reached my destination for the day, which was Raohe Street Night Market, right next to Song Shan Market. It was only 4:40 pm and thus wasn’t quite evening yet when I reached the area, but it was a fairly long road with a couple of short branches protruding from the road, so I stayed here for a while to browse around. Raohe Street consisted of a row of actual shops on either side of the street, and then down the middle of the street there was a central row of temporary food stalls and carts and tables and stuff, that divided the street in two. That middle row was generally two stalls wide, each stall pointing toward the nearer side of the road relative to which side of the middle row it was on, so much so that the wide Raohe Street was basically divided into two narrower streets, and each street was flanked by a row of “real” shops and a row of food carts on either side.

Like Shilin Night Market yesterday, this place also had a very prominent embedded temple in the middle. I’m recognizing the characters 福德宮 as representing something temple-related like a Palace of Fortune now, where one prays for increased fortune. Probably.

I soon ended up on the other side of the shopping street, where there was a nice pedestrian area and a Buddhist temple.

I ate a pork pepper pie from a stall near that end of the Raohe Street:

Many of the stalls were opening for the evening but were not fully set up and ready to sell things yet, as even at that point it was only 5:20 pm or so. Some early birds were busy catching the tourists that were wandering by though. Two separate women were also working the streets and tried to accost me and strike me up in friendly conversation to sell me some sort of terrible service or product or other, but in both cases I pretended not to speak Chinese and they both immediately left me alone. So for some reason they were targetting locals instead of tourists. Or maybe mainland China tourists instead of international tourists, the latter of which there were a decent (but not majority) number.

Anyway, I then walked back down the other side of the street back to the very star, while poking my head into some of the side streets of that adjacent market. A short gallery of similar-ish pictures follows: