Sugar Factory and Night Markets
Trip Start
Dec 11, 2008
1
10
17
Trip End
Jan 09, 2009
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Friday, December 19, 2008
The dome of light is the largest piece of glass artwork in the world – so I am told. It tells the story of the 4 elements – wind, rain, fire, and water. Its cool. So we snap a couple of pictures and head off to see Irene's High School. It is the number 1 high school in the city, all girls because it’s the top school, and Irene’s family has been going there for decades. Insert your favorite Asian school girl picture here. They do have uniforms and they are what you think they are. We snap a couple of pictures and move on before I get any ideas…
We head to a department store – which are all like Harrods in London – food and groceries in the basement and the rest of dedicated to whatever. We go to the food of course – we taste some wine – which is good. In Taiwan – wine is really expensive – $40-$50 US for a regular bottle. We don’t buy any. Apparently Irene is really hungry because she is not only eating the snack – dried fish - from another store but also all of the samples in the store. ALL OF THEM… There were at least 12 types of tofu for tasting – she tried them all and other stuff. This is perfectly acceptable in Taiwan. Try everything and don’t even buy anything. I like the idea, but cannot bring myself to do it yet. We stop for coffee on the way back to the Jian Tai-Tai’s house.
Next, its time for dinner. We are going to the Nanhua night market. It is time for beef noodle soup. When we first started dating, Irene talked about how much she liked it over and over and over. Now, its time for the real thing. Irene’s family has been going to this place for 15 years. The chef actually slices the noodles into the soup as we are watching. The noodles come off a bread loaf sized piece of dough – almost a football shape. It is pretty cool. The noodles cook super fast. They also order some pig’s ear, bean curd, and "rice cake." Once again I am the last one to finish, by far. I am half done and they are all telling me to take my time. I try the rice cake – which is black looking. Its basically a rectangular bar of rice cooked with congealed blood. It doesn’t taste like much, but I am not one for blood either. We move on to a stand that has some gelatinous lime-jello type of stuff – jelly fig. It looks weird when the jello starts drooping over the side of the dishes its displayed in… In reality, it’s a really light taste of lime with honey in a lightly sweetened syrup. Very refreshing!
We move on to the Liuhe (Lee-oh-huh) night market. This is what a night market should be. There are stalls after stalls after stalls of food and clothing and games and stuff. Seafood stalls with all parts of the fish for sale – cheek, head, guts, tail, skin, etc… Pig stalls with the heart, liver, kidney, testicles, marrow, etc. for sale. Even the pig’s fallopian tube is for sale!!! Are you kidding me? Duck head, liver, neck, tongue, guts, etc… Its all here… Whatever you want is for sale. We don’t order anything… this time. We do get sugar cane juice which is good – not very sweet and a weird green color. We also stop at a stall to check out some dried seafood condiments. I try a dried scallop one, the rest have little fish in them and I can see their eyes. No matter how many times I try dried seafood, I still don’t like it. We walk out the way we came and head back to the house.
At the house we have the budda’s head fruit. This is a very interesting fruit. It is a green bumpy surface on the outside. You open it like breaking off a piece of bread. Inside is whitish custard looking with seed pods. You eat these and spit out the black seed. It is very sweet and tastes much much better than it looks. Some mah-jong games later, we hit the sack.
