Thursday April 29

We had a nice breakfast at Rosestone with our host, Jenny, and Phil. Our host then gave us a tour of the place and we saw courtyards, plants, and antiques I had not seen in my earlier wanderings. We learned more about the history of the family and the building and the difficulties of keeping that very large place in good shape.

Our host drove us to the train station and we managed to get onto the previously full 10:45 train. This wasn’t a high speed train but it was a new train that, as Phil had explained to me, could lean on the turns and therefore go faster than the old standard train.

The standard train service in Taiwan is very reasonably priced, trains run frequently between the cities and the stations are convenient for most people. There are now true high speed trains on the west side of the island but those stations are, except for Taipei, a 20-30 minute ride outside the cities.
When we arrived in Taipei we proceeded to Shilin, the section of Taipei that we’ll be staying in for a few days. We walked a bit until our room was ready and quickly saw that Shilin is very different than the downtown area that we were stayed in earlier. Shilin is much wealthier, and is full of thriving small businesses, COFFEE SHOPS, and high tech companies. I hate to use the word but here goes—it’s vibrant.

As we strolled down a Shilin street we saw a lot of the small businesses, including the 7-11 had burning incense and offerings in front of the stores. Sally asked someone about the offerings and they said it was for the Earth god, who had a temple in the neighborhood. As soon as she heard there was a temple nearby, we had to walk the neighborhood streets until we found it about five blocks away.

A building had been built around the original temple building but after we walked through a busy group of people working on offerings, we found the original temple in the back . After viewing the Earth god and the other deities we sat down behind a five year old and watched a very elaborate puppet show with prerecorded music and special lighting. We noticed two more temples on the short walk back to our hotel.
We eventually got back to the hotel, rested for a bit and then headed for the Shihlin night market which is a block away from the hotel. We needed to eat so we walked into the big warehouse-like building that containes the equivalent of half the food carts from the Minnesota State Fair. We wandered through this maze of unfamiliar food and chose…nothing. Sally was working very hard to decipher the names of things but the names often didn’t tell you what a food was and I was just confused.

Finally we agreed to try chou dofu (stinky tofu), a big favorite in Taiwan and the People’s Republic. Stinky tofu is heavily fermented which gives it a different texture and it’s characteristic smell. We chose fried chou dofu which was wimpier than the chou dofu with goose liver soup done in ma la Szechuan style. It wasn’t bad.

We followed that with the local favorite, the deep fried little cookie inside a big cookie and finished with some sticky rice with meat filling. The total cost was probably about three dollars a person.
We then discovered the true size of the night market. We started walking down the major street running next to this food building and found a long street, really a large alley, lined with clothing stores and crammed with vendor carts. We pushed through the mass of thousands of teenagers for a while and the alley kept going and going and going. The market is really huge. We bought a couple of nice t-shirts for $160 NT ($5) and went back to the hotel.

We were in a really posh “free upgrade” room on this night. The room had (I’m not kidding) a second room with a pond fringed by fake rocks. I speculated that they wanted us to say “Wow, what a great room. I’d like to stay in here for another $1,000NT a night.” We did not tell the desk we wanted to do that.

BTW, there is a debate on Trip Advisor about whether this is a “love hotel” used by young Taiwanese couples. After some observation I think the answer is yes. Maybe the complimentary condom in every room is a tipoff.