La tournée de Taiwan 2013 : Shilin Night Market

After the visit to the hot spring in Xin Beitou and the Palace Museum, we went up Yang Mingshan. Came down from Yang Mingshan, the sky started to turn dark.  It was time to go to the Shilin night market.  We took the MRT from the Shilin station to Jiantan station which was just one station away.  The night market was just across the road right in front of the MRT station

As we walked along, the first food stall attracted our attention belonged to a very old couple selling 潤饼卷。It was sort of a roll with ingredients in it. Almost like the popiah in our country. Well, may be it was a popiah after all with a different name

Next was the stinking toufu again but this time with a twist.  It was charcoal grilled with sauce and garnishing. Poked in sticks like satay.  The taste? Well you know...all chou toufu smells alike...smellyy :D  But to be fair, this one was not as stinking as the one in soup found in the Rouhe street night market.

Now this was new to me.  This guy was selling fried hor fun, but the hor fun was  not in the form of strips but in thick pancake shape...with stuffing in it.

Round the corner we came to the main market itself , walao.... there was a hawker centre at the basement of the market !

The sheer number of stalls and the variety of food they were selling were just fantastic.  One will wonder, with so many sellers and customers, not to mention those who just came to take photos,  the basement food court was not stuffy and most the wonderful thing was.... where had all the smokes and smell gone when there were so many stalls cooking and frying and grilling? The ventilation system was just fantastic.

We went round food searching... the fried crab caught my attention.  Bought one and a grilled cuttlefish, then walked over to the owamisua stall to satisfy our hunger.  This stall seemed  to have a lot of customers, must be a famous one. The Big Dragon Head stall.

The owamisua was a bit different from the one that we ate a day ago.  Instead of having thick brown gravy, this one was in  clear soup with a number of XL size oysters in it.

We also ordered the fried oyster just to compare.  This one failed.  Though it was a thumb up on the size of the oysters, but it had too much and too thick starch which made it overall not as nice as the Penang's ojian.

One thing we learnt, here in Taiwan, was that their food stalls and shops did not sell drinks. Not even plain water.  So before you went into any shop to eat, go tapau some drinks outside first.