October 7, 2012

We finally went to a Night Market yesterday evening.  Surprised it took so long for us to go there cause they are in the top 5 of things to do in Taipei in every tour book.  From what I'm hearing, October is a big tourist month in Taiwan due to the extended holiday in mainland China celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day.  Combine that with it being a very pleasant Saturday night and the market was super packed last night.  Imagine a two square block enclosed market with alley ways coursing throughout that are at most 7ft. wide, jammed not only with people and food vendors, but every type of crappy souvenir stand from t-shirts to discount iPhone cases.  And of course the t-shirts were all in English and at least half of those contained typically bizarre phrasing.  This one is hard to see, but it said "You Fuck My Wife" with the 'c" and 'W' covered over for it to then read "You Funk My Life".  Huh? 

 Am gonna assume it was the peak night of the season and not be deterred to return.  Add that I messed up the settings on the camera going in, so lost most of the snaps I took and the experience was a bit of a let down.  Hopefully will have a better entry on them in the future, but we did eat some interesting snacks. 

This was probably the tastiest treat...eggs with oysters and greens.

 

 

The mixture of the eggs and oysters gave it a gelatinous texture that was unusual at first but was yummy once you got past it.  Glad we did not see how they were storing the oysters before we ate...

This was unusual...candy coated tomatoes shish kebab style.

They look like they were roasted but in fact had a hard candy shell.  Didn't taste as gross as they sound, but could only get two in me before the sweetness became too much.  Carolyn got the coated strawberries which was a better fit.  I wondered if the candy coating negates the inherent goodness of the tomato?

They also had a fish/turtle soup stand. 

It was off in the corner of the market and the dudes sitting around eating their meals looked pretty shady/miserable.  They had snakes in cages and a bunch of creatures suspended in some kind of brine/formaldehyde.  They were adamant about no photographs, but I took one anyway.

 

Eating this kind off soup is supposed to have certain properties that is supposed to enhance the libido.  We have a guest in town next week that we are going to take sight seeing and plan to go to Snake Alley.  This is what Wikipedia has to say about it.  Deer penis wine anyone?

 

Sitting around the dinner table the other night with the kids and wondered what they felt about the upcoming election.  Carolyn wants Obama cause she heard that Romney "said something bad about a lot of people."  Paul is still undecided, but went into a self-discussion group that tackled the question that "if Obama was an albino, would he still be the first black president."  That made my mind go back to the first George Carlin album I ever heard...Class Clown.  I remember hiding under a table while my sister and her friend listened to it on an old record player.  It was the one that had The Seven Words bit on it (still can rattle those seven off), but what Paul's albino question reminded me of was Carlin talking about being in Sunday school and asking the teacher the question, "Can God make a rock so big that even he can't lift it?"  My son can really paint a word picture, but sometimes they look like this and make me feel like this