Taiwan May 2008, part 1

Besides cooking, my other love is travelling. I wouldn't say I'm an avid traveller, but I do love a good trip, a brief sojourn into the foreign, exotic and thrilling =) As such, I try to take a backpacking trip [seeing as I'm a penny-less undergraduate] once a year, and this year, I chose to visit Taiwan!

The suspects:

[Left to right] Jun Kai, myself and Audrey. Thank you guys, you made the trip!

It was a 2 week trips, and the stories are endless, but my time is finite, so I'll have to cut it brief. Still, I don't really know how I'm going to arrange the post, but for now I think I'll do a chronology/location style.

Day 1 / Taipei

Since JetStar only flies to Taipei, we began and ended our trip there. And we had someone to pick us up from the airport!

[from left] Alger and Kimble. JK had met Kimble on http://www.couchsurfing.com/ [great website!], and then arranged for him to show us around Taipei. As we would come to discover, the best part of Taiwan is its people! Taiwanese are sooooooo hospitable it can be shocking sometimes. But seriously, they are the most hospitable people I've ever met =) Thank you too!

We arrived in Taipei in the evening, and we immediately swooped into our trip, thanks to Kimble! They brough us to our first Taiwanese night market!

And there, we had the greatest first meal ever =D

From left, Wasabi taiwanese sausage in a rice sausage [大肠包小肠], fruits in hardened candy [冰糖水果], more taiwanese sausages grilling, snake soup [! my first time. Tastes like chicken], all sorts of breads and pastries, oyster omelette Taiwanese style, mua chi [a kind of glutinous rice sweet pastry] and in the last photo, candied sweet potato and cockles.

After that, we headed to Michael's [Kimble's ex-student, who agreed to put us up. Suuuuper nice of him!] place, where we will spend the next two night.

And that concludes the first day/evening in Taiwan, which was fantastic, a great start to what would turn out to be a great trip =)