Another day, another familiar Taiwan pattern of blogging or working in the morning to early afternoon, sandwiching a quick run out to get breakfast, and then walking or bussing around until I end up at some night market or other in the evening! My breakfast exploits today started with a bit of a misadventure, for I arrived at my targetted store at 10:50 am, since it was listed as open on Google Maps from 7 am until 3 pm or something, but they were actually apparently closed for a mid-morning break or something and wouldn’t be ready until 11:10 am, according to the person in the store that I spoke to.

Well, no problem! Instead, I walked around and ended up at Songjiang Market again, a stone’s throw away from my desired eatery. I had previously mentioned this place three days ago, as it lay between my lodging and the nearest train station to it, and at that point it was closed but a whole bunch of cramped and somewhat dubious food carts were parked outside of it in the evening when I passed by it.

I had noticed that it was actually open when I passed by it on the way to breakfast yesterday, but I didn’t stop by the place at that time. Today though, since I had about 20 minutes to kill, I returned here and stepped through the doors into a traditional market that made me very happy. There were no food carts parked outside, as seen here where they were previously, but there was a door leading into the interior of the market to the left by the stairs.

The top level of the market was basically one large loop of stalls selling fruits and vegetables, clothing, fresh food that could be packaged away into little bento boxes, and weird little trinkets, most for daily life use rather than for souvenir purposes. The actual market was bustling, though not terribly packed, with locals buying up edible provisions or goods for the day or cheap shirts and pants.

These (probably) glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in the green pandan leaves below looked tempting. Perhaps another day. The (probably) wobbly agar jelly or whatever next to it looked interesting too, though jelly is not my sort of snack.

This was a buffet-style fill your bento box thing, that I watched other people do and then recognized the protocol from yesterday’s breakfast place. I was tempted. Perhaps another day!

So many stationery odds and ends here!

There was also a slope, flanked by a couple shops on its side, and some perpendicular stairs which cut through the middle of the slope. Both led down to a smaller, lower level of the market that had vendors selling fresh meat. I didn’t really go down there except to take a singular picture.

There were lots of shops selling clothing, most of them going for between 150 to 500 Taiwanese yuan or so, with the vast majority in the 250-350 range. Many of the shops actually had their goods unpriced though, as one can see in the many pictures above, and I only found out the prices by actually asking the stall owner. Some of the goods were definitely suspect too. Like this Huh moment.

But I actually did end up buying something from this market — I had been on a lookout for cheap shirts and shorts to wear around the house, and I picked up a couple from this store.

The owner actually guessed that I was from Malaysia or Singapore, and when I asked how she knew, she said that it was due to the way I said some word or other. But we were conversing (and it had only been very briefly) in Mandarin Chinese. So apparently I have a Chinese accent as well. Great. She said that she recognized it because sometimes they’d get Chinese tourists from Singapore or Malaysia that came by and specifically sought out this place to visit. That was cool, and she was friendly, and she was standing next to a pile of nice-looking shirts and shorts that only cost 100 NTD each, so I ended up picking up one shirt and one pair of shorts for a total of 200 NTD, or about $9 CAD.

I am a dinosaur, fear me. Isn’t that so cute? I need to find other cheap <$5 clothes.

After that, I went back to my target eatery, something that Google Translates to Guangtian Snack House and Vegetarian Workshop, but is probably a little bit more nuanced than that (光田 簡食屋 蔬食工坊). This place was amazing and cheap, with my vegetarian meal costing 105 yen (about $4.50 CAD) and consisting of a bowl of rice in the middle, surrounded by a pile of mushrooms, radishes, tofu, and assorted vegetables. It tasted really good, and even came with some sort of flavoured soup (I think radish soup but without the actual radishes) to wash it down with. I was quite satisfied with this meal, though I’d maybe have gone for another 20 NTD for a larger bowl of rice if I could do it over again. Nonetheless, even though I’m not a vegetarian, it was yum. The nice old lady behind the counter did not skimp on the serving at all.

The name of my dish translated to King Oyster Mushroom Rice.

As a side note, meals are interesting in Chinese cities because I can never read a good chunk of the menu at all (largely I know certain keywords) and thus have to either judiciously use Google Translate or know what I want before coming to a place via looking at reviews, and then do some pointing to the menu (if on a wall) or circling it (if on a sheet) to indicate my choice. But I can often still manage to make small talk with the owner even if they can’t speak much English, since I know enough broken Mandarin Chinese to pass. I’ve also learnt some words like the Chinese words for credit card (信用卡 / Xìn yòng kǎ) and receipt (收據 / Shōu jù) in the few days that I’ve been here, just through said interactions. I’ve also found that store owners like it when I try to practice by repeating the name of the dish that they just said.

I went back to the lodging for a bit to chill out, finish blogging and working, and watch the rising temperatures with horror. It had been in the high 20s or maybe exactly 30 degrees Celsius the past couple of days when I was setting out at 1pm/2pm, but today it was 33 degrees Celsius, and that was a little high for my liking. At least it’s not an outright heatwave that apparently some countries further south, in Southeast Asia, are currently going through though. It looks like it will be raining to some degree for my final two days in Taipei, which might wash out the remaining night markets that I haven’t visited yet.

The good thing about all this heat though is that I won’t have to spend a week acclimatizing once I go to Singapore. The temperatures here are not that much different from Singapore so I’m already going through that process now!

Still, my plan for two days ago was to walk north, my plan yesterday was to walk east. Thus, today, my plan was to just walk south to some night market far in the distance, and I wasn’t about to let something trivial as the weather stop me. Then again, I only (“only”) did 18,712 steps today though, 18,850 by the more permissive Samsung Health, so maybe it did.

I did find myself using a Singapore walking strategy — keep to the side of the street with shade, and duck into every convenience store and/or shopping mall possible along the way and pretend to be looking around a bit to get out of the heat.

The first thing I did upon my afternoon walk was not go get lunch, I actually stopped off in one of those aforementioned 7-Eleven stores and picked up a fancy icash2.0 card.

At this point it’s probably a souvenir since I only have  couple days left in Taiwan, but hey, I can use it for next trip. It works like an Easycard, but I think has some sort of extra point reward system if I go ahead and create an account and stuff too. Even without that, I can apparently withdraw the cash from my current Easycard for a small fee, then deposit it into this one, and use this for my transit card as well as for purchases in convenience stores, some supermarkets and restaurants, and more.

If I’m not mistaken I’ve seen some versions of these cards that aren’t even rectangular but instead are more keychain-shaped, but can still be used for transit card payments etc. I’m not 100% sure on that one though and didn’t want to try. But I had become aware that convenience stores were selling these cuter-than-standard ones and that new ones rotate in and out over time, so I wanted one as a souvenir of my time here. And Kuromi is very cute.

I also stopped by the post office and shipped the one CD that I had missed out on shipping from Japan to Mart in Switzerland. That cost 109 NTD all in, so under $5 CAD ,which is nice, plus now I know how to use the Taiwan Post Office system. It was basically almost identical to the Japanese one, just in Chinese instead of Japanese.

Then I finally went to get lunch. I ate lunch at a Vietnamese place:

That specific dish was Hot and Sour Pork Pho, and it was awesome. Very tasty. Price was good at 110 NTD too.

I then proceeded to jump from shadow to shadow on my walk south. Some interesting things I saw included this guy, who was carrying two pieces of timber on his shoulders and gave no mind to the traffic lights, strolling right on across amidst a wave of honks from vehicles.

This street vendor was very shocked to be the subject of my photography!

This pile of Totoros, plants, and er.. plushies outside of a cafe. Are those plump Pink Panthers?

This flower trying to get grafted to a tree:

And this nice intersection view.

I then reached a mall called Guang Hua Digital Plaza, a secondary objective that I had earmarked for visiting upon my southern trek because it was apparently full of electronics stores, which made it sound exactly like Singapore’s Sim Lim Square, where Dad used to work and which I visited a couple of years ago. I am happy to report that my hunch was accurate, and the vibe of the mall was exactly the same.

The outside of the mall from two different entrances looked like this:

The inside had a LOT of repeat stores — there must have been at least eight ASUS/Republic of Gamers stores, and many other popular digital brands had multiple little stores selling what looked to be the exact same things (laptops, PCs, or Playstation/Switch games) across the first couple of levels of the mall too. I took a couple pictures of each level, and compiled a little gallery.