Day 3 – 13/11/2017 (Monday)
Still sick. Meh. Couldn’t sleep again but at least the hotel promised to change our rooms later today. We packed our bags early in the morning and vacated the room, and stored our luggage at the hotel’s reception while leaving for the day.
I brought Bruno to try the 阿宗面线, which almost every Singaporean raved about and said it’s a “must-eat” dish when in Taiwan. I was really not a fan of it the last time I tried it, but nevertheless I feel every one who’s new to Taiwan should try it. It was slightly drizzling in the morning, and the weather was rather cooling, so I thought all right, maybe the weather is a factor when it comes to enjoying the mee sua too, so I also ordered a small bowl for myself.
Verdict? This round I enjoyed the mee sua better than the last time. I think the weather REALLY plays a part, haha. It’s really not fun to slurp a hot bowl of mee sua in sweltering heat. But in such cooling wet morning, it’s quite a nice experience. The mee sua is as starchy as usual, without much ingredients inside. I see many customers heaping garlic and vinegar (and chilli) into their bowl, but uh, no thanks for me. Bruno loves this particular dish though. So I guess it’s good that I told him to try…
I needed my daily caffeine, so Bruno looked at his Google Map and brought me to 蜂大咖啡 (Fong Da Coffee) (map). It was a very interesting shop, because from the outside, you wouldn’t have thought that it’s a cafe. It looks more like a coffee roaster place (with them roasting the coffee near the entrance of the shop) actually. We peered in and found that there’s inner seating area where people WERE drinking coffee after all. We walked past the coffee roaster (damn, roasted coffee beans smell SO GOOD) to find seats, only to be told to go up to the second level as the first level of the cafe was relatively full. We were the first two patrons at second level, so yay! It’s almost like having the whole place to ourselves, lol.
I ordered my usual latte, and Bruno tried something new – 曼特宁 (Mandehling) coffee. I told him not to expect anything like Chun Cui He’s Mandehling… this kind of Mandehling is likely to be Mandehling BEANS and it’ll be black coffee – and he said he know. Oh well, up to him. When his coffee arrived, he took a sip and immediately made a face… hahahaha. Too bitter, I guess. He added a lot of sugar but I guess it didn’t really help. :x I can’t help but had a “I told you so” moment… if only I hadn’t had a sorethroat that prevented me from talking too much, I would be having a field day suanning him about it. =D On a side note, my latte was OK, nothing to shout about though.
Our plans for this day was actually to explore around 忠孝敦化 (Zhongxiao Dunhua) alleys for interesting shops and cafes, before heading to Eslite Xinyi, then 饶河夜市 (Raohe night market) at night. We found ourselves at 忠孝敦化, with not much of an idea which way to go. It was also raining and we had to carry an umbrella. We popped in an expensive supermarket at some random place, and to be honest we didn’t really see many cafes as I thought we would. We got hungry at some point and we randomly went into a small restaurant called 宜品福州干拌面 (map) along one of the alleys, and ordered some food. Bruno ordered the signature dish – dry noodles, while I ordered 卤肉饭. We also ordered a meatball soup and some steamed cabbage to share. The food is decent (to me), but Bruno seems to like it quite a bit.
After lunch, we went on our way to Taipei City Hall MRT station in order to continue our plans to 诚品信义书店 (Eslite Xinyi) (map). The moment we left the station, a super duper nice fragrant (from food!) hit our noses and we were both like, “OMG 好香?!”. We followed our noses and found that the smell came from this pretty big bakery called Semeur (map). They were freshly baking some kind of bread block with different flavours that smell OMG SO NICE. Bruno totally couldn’t resist and went in to buy some. I picked a flavour to try too. I can’t quite remember what flavour he bought – one peanut one something else – while I bought the cheese one.
After he paid for it, we couldn’t wait and immediately bite into them while standing outside the bakery.
OK let’s just say it doesn’t taste as amazing as it smells. Haha. But it’s still very good! Partly because it’s still warm and freshly baked. The outer layer was rather crispy, and the inner bread was very soft and fluffy. Eating the whole piece wasn’t as heavy as I thought it’d be. It’s good, but I won’t buy it again. =x
We explored around the station a little as it was linked to other buildings with a lot of bakeries, before we went next door to Eslite. The moment we went in, I was floored by what I seen. Books. Lots and lots and lots of books. The interior decoration is also very classy – it just gives a very positive “bookstore” vibe, if you get what I mean. And they have tons of Chinese books – my favourite! Bruno’s legs were kinda in pain, and he hates Chinese books, so I helped him find a bench to sit and rest while I took my time to browse around. The bookstore also had an old-school music section selling vinyl records and CDs! And music-related merchandise! So cool! I could have stayed at this place for DAYS and I won’t feel tired of it.
After a couple of hours, we looked at the store directory to find out where the stationery section (Bruno’s favourite) is, and we took the lift up. What greeted us was instead, KiKi restaurant (map)! Bruno had wanted to buy KiKi’s instant noodles but what we understood was that it was very hard to find them in normal supermarkets, and the only place that will guaranteed to sell them is KiKi restaurants – and that’s exactly what we stumbled upon! The restaurant would open at 5pm, and it was around 4pm when we saw the restaurant. So we just lingered around the stationery section, and promptly went to queue at 5pm to purchase the instant noodle packs. I reminded him that he had to lug these noodles around as we would be heading to night market later, and he said he’s fine with it. Anything for his KiKi noodles, it seems. =P
We then followed the Maps and walked to a bus stop where there should be a bus going straight to 饶河夜市. It was raining quite heavily by then, and many people were crowding at the bus stop. One thing about Taipei’s buses are that.. some of them are as inconsistent as Singapore’s buses lol. On my Maps it said the bus would be here in 8 minutes. The bus stop LED also reflected the same thing. However, we waited for almost like 20 minutes, before the bus came. I almost gave up waiting for it…
Nevertheless, when we reached Raohe night market, it was raining quite heavily. And much to our disappointment, there were many stalls which weren’t open (due to the rain I supposed), and it was really difficult to walk the night markets holding umbrellas. We wandered and looked at the stalls for abit, before we chose a random stall for dinner. Turned out that the stall that we ordered from was a “famous” one (at least famous online). We ordered 卤肉饭 again (gotta love those braised meat, really!), and also a prawn omelette. He also ordered a lamb soup, and for drinks, I ordered a starfruit drink while he ordered sour plum drink. It was actually one of the better meals I had. The braised meat rice was really good, and the prawn omelette was a pleasant surprise to us – it’s actually “oyster-omelette style” aka starchy, (蚝煎) but with prawns. And it was quite nice!
We left the disappointing Raohe night market after dinner, even though the rain had abated and more shops were opening as we left. We went back to Ximending and bought the instant seaweed tofu miso soup from Family Mart, thinking it could probably the same as the one we had in Japan. But sadly… it’s far from it, even though it’s still Family Mart brand.
Meh, we missed the instant Yasai miso soup from Japan’s Family Mart so much. =( At least we got a new room and no weird clanging sounds at night! Yay!
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