Day 4: Handicraft Mart and Shinlin Night Market

We spent Christmas morning relaxing and videoing via Microsoft Instant Messenger with our families. I took another bubble bath in the huge tub in our beautiful bathroom that has lots of marble. My feet were so dirty from all of the walking around on the tour in my clogs with no socks. My ankles were gray from all of it. Ew! Kevin went out and found some breakfast for us while I uploaded photos to our Flickr site and came back with “egg burger” (aka Egg McMuffin) meals with OJ from McDonalds at Taipei 101. Surprisingly, the McDonalds there wasn’t expensive at all. We figured that our meals totaled about $4.50 for both of us. We organized our belongings, had some snacks in the room, and set out for the day’s adventure.

Our goal for the day was to do some shopping at the Taiwan Handicraft Market. We walked several blocks to our MRT subway station, Taipei City Hall Station. We took the blue line to the main station, and then the red line to the National Taiwan University Hospital station. It was only about a two block walk to the Taiwan Handicraft Market and was very easy to get to. The Taiwan Handicraft Market is a store that has four floors of shopping. Rule of thumb would be to start in the basement and work your way up, as it gets more expensive as you go up. They do have shopping baskets, but the women working on each floor will want to hold your items for you until you are ready to pay. They don’t want you walking up and down and transporting merchandise from floor to floor. In the basement I found several cute things to share with our daughter as she grows older. I found a wooden puzzle of Taiwan on the left side when you go down the stairs. It looks like the pieces to the puzzle are the counties of Taiwan. It looks a lot like the state map puzzles that you can find here in the US. We also found marionettes of Chinese New Year dragons that were only about $15 and they’re pretty cute. There were several little things down here that one could turn into Christmas tree decorations. On the first floor, right when you come in to the left, there is a jewelry counter. To the back of the jewelry counter there is a section for having a chop made. There are several stones to choose from. We brought with us our daughter’s characters, and are having a chop made for her out of jade. You also choose font style for the stamp, and remember to buy some red ink for your chop stamp as well. The ladies working had great English skills, and were very happy to help us shop for the chop. They were a little confused why we wanted this name for the chop. They showed us a photo on a mug with a woman in Taiwanese history that has a very similar name. We explained that the shop was for someone else, a baby, and I guess that made sense to them now and we weren’t questioned any more about the name on our chop. It takes a few days to have the chop made, and they will have it delivered to your hotel. I’m really glad that my friend KB tipped us off to going early in our trip to have the chop made, so there would be plenty of time to have it completed before we head home. We did the bulk of our Christmas shopping here. There’s lots of jewelry to choose from in jade and Taiwanese coral, a great selection of tea sets, and artwork as well. Once again, this is a great place to shop BEFORE you meet your child. I wouldn’t want to be shopping for tea sets with a baby strapped to me or with a toddler that wants to run around and touch things. One of our favorite items was in the postcard area. There are postcards that open up like pop-up books on a spinner rack that are really cute.

With heavy bags in our hands, we walked to the Taipei main station as it wasn’t much further than the stop we originally got off on. We were in search of some good eats at the Breeze Food Court. The food court is on the second floor of the train station and is in a circle shape. It really reminds me of a food court in the mall back home in the US. I found a place to sit with our shopping bags while Kevin went in search of some good eats. He placed his order, and then they have an electronic sign board that calls out your number to let you know that your food is ready. He returned back with meals, both containing a kind of soup with noodles, beef, and a large vegetable, a side dish, and some kind of strange sweet juice. I didn’t care for the flavor of the soup with the huge chunks of beef, so Kevin let me trade him for the soup he had with the meat balls. It wasn’t expensive, maybe the equivalent of $10 US for the both of us to eat. We were sitting near an ice cream shop, and picked out some ice cream for dessert. Kevin picked out a scoop of green apple and a second scoop of Rum Raisin. Mmmm. After dinner we walked around the food court to see what else we could find. Lots of coffee places for sure. When I saw a Mr. Donut, I told Kevin that we just had to have some, as Sherry said that they were really good. I picked out four doughnuts to bring back to the hotel room for us. We enjoyed them later while organizing photos and working on blog posts, and called them our Christmas cakes. We really liked the chocolate darker doughnut filled with strawberry fluff. Mmmmm.

While we were at the train station, we bought our tickets to take the high speed train from Taipei to Tainan tomorrow. The ticket machines are very easy to use and clearly marked in English. We had a problem with one machine because it wouldn’t take our credit card. We went to another machine and it took cash just fine. I’m really surprised how inexpensive the high speed train is. Our tickets were $1145 NTD, which is about $37 US. This would be a really really really long way by car. Our drive from Taipei to TaiChung was about four hours on the highway, and I’m sure that a car ride to Tainan would take an hour or two more. The high speed train will get us to Tainan in one hour and forty five minutes. Amazing!

After taking our shopping bags back to the hotel room, we rested, called family members to wish them Merry Christmas, and then headed out in search of a night market. We decided to go to the Shilin Night Market instead of Snake Alley because it was closer to a subway station and our feet were pretty tired.

I’m sorry to say that going to this night market wasn’t as fun as I had hoped it would be. I think we were there at a really busy time, between 10pm until 11:30pm, and maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. It was crowded and hard to walk town the little streets with vendors having goods in the middle of the street. We didn’t take a copy of the Google Map of the market that we had online, and I wished we had that with us. I think we spent most of our time walking in the “fashion” area with lots of clothes, accessories, and shoes for sale. As it is winter time… there were lots scarves and little thin sweaters for sale. I had really hoped to find some things for Hannah here, but I didn’t find anything I wanted for her. I was looking for decorative traditional clothing and didn’t find much… and I liked things I found online and in Chicago’s Chinatown much better. There was much more and much cuter clothing for little dogs than for small children. The signs for the food vendors weren’t in English, so it was hard to figure out what the foods were. I had hoped to hop in a long time, assuming that the vendors with the longer lines had better food. Unfortunately, most food vendors didn’t have any line at all, so I couldn’t tell if what they had was good or not from the line. We did find a bit of a line at a place that has everything on a stick. You choose what you want, put it in a little basket, and then they cook it for you. The cooks were backed up, so we might have waited 20 minutes for our snack to cook. I chose four items: mushrooms, corn on the cob, green onions wrapped in bacon, and tofu. A woman at the next stall spoke English and helped us translate whether we’d like sesame seeds on the food, and how hot we’d like it. They fried the items, put a barbeque like sauce on them, and sprinkled them with the sesame seeds. I liked everything except the tofu was so-so. The bacon wrapped green onions were my favorite. The four items only cost us about $1.25 US. We also found some candied strawberries on a stick that were a lot like a candy apple that we’d find at a fair back home. I also bought a drink that was a lot like a lemon shake up, but made from cranberries instead. I think we might have smelled stinky tofu. There was a horrible smell coming from one of the vendor’s carts. It was pretty bad, for sure. I peeked at the cart but didn’t recognize it, so we didn’t stop. I couldn’t force myself to buy food when we had no idea what it was just because it smelled the worst.




This is one of my favorite photos. Seems like about a third of the people on the street wear face masks because of pollution. If I rode around on a moped all day long sniffing exhaust, I might want to wear one too. Miss Hannah already has a smog mask, thanks to Judy and her mom. Hannah's is yellow with a little bunny on it.










Once we arrived back at the hotel, it was after midnight. We were so tired from all the walking, and hit the sack right away. It’s Friday morning now. I’m writing this post while Kevin gets in a little more of his beauty sleep. We need to organize our things today to decide what goes to Tainan with us and what stays. We don’t need to bring too many baby items with us, as we’re be taking the train back to Taipei Monday after we pick up Hannah.

Wow… hard to believe that in just three days we’ll be leaving out hotel in Tainan, leaving to go meet our daughter. Can we just fast forward to that part???