Danshui Night market.
Random turkish ice cream place at Danshui... the challenge is to actually get him to give you the ice cream cone. he'll act like he's gonna give it to you and then at the last moment he'll spin the cone around on his hand and make you look silly. he does this several times. endless entertainment, obviously.



candied tomatoes at the ShiLin night market... a little too sweet for my taste.




potato chips! how DO they make them like that...

蚵仔煎

taiwanese oyster omelet... yum.

taipei = night markets. it's that simple. everywhere you go, there's a night market. you shop, you eat, you go home happy (and sometimes bloated). there are a couple historic streets that i've visited in the area, one in Danshui and one in Daxi and they're basically night markets that operate during the day as well. my next goal is to find non-night market related activities to entertain myself. there are hot springs and some decent hiking in the area that i have yet to make it out to.


my carcass at Yuma, a southwestern restaurant opened by south africans. pretty good place for ribs and fajitas. good western food is hard to come by and after eating taiwanese food all day for a couple weeks you start to crave burgers, burritos, pasta and pizza. when i first got here, while i was looking to eat taiwanese food, my roommates and their friends were in western food mode so they were hitting up all these western restaurants. this dinner was a going away dinner for Andrew, an ABC who lives upstairs from me. he mentioned that his sister, Karen Wang, also went to Tufts and when i clicked on her facebook profile, although i didn't recognise her, i was surprised to find that she's dating Eric Richmond. remember him? small world...





taipei 101, currently the tallest building in the world but soon to be eclipsed by the Burj Dubai when it's finished. i haven't been to the top but my classmate Vince is going today b/c he's collecting pics of the ~100 ox statues that they've got up in the taipei area in commemoration of the year of the ox and there's one on top of 101 that they are taking down this weekend.


vince's last name and his chinese AND astrological zodiac sign = OX. AND he's big and looks like an ox. makes perfect sense.

i attended a dinner in the 101 area last week for another student's birthday and met her classmates. i met two guys older than me (whoohoo!) and one of them went to bronx science. engine, do you remember Sam Lo? he says he bumped into you a year or so ago. the other day, he had an old Bronx Science frisbee with him, the one with Guile from Street Fighter as the logo. that really brought back memories when i saw that. man i'm old. ;)