We started Day 2 early, leaving the hotel around 9.30 in the morning. But as we walked around XiMenDing area, none of the shops were open, except... The Rice Noodles stall!
Happy food hunters:
The noodles were nice, and really soft, but after a few spoonfuls of it, it's pretty much nothing special really.
The different flavourings on offer, the chilli was freaking hot!
After breakfast, we were off to Dan Shui (birthplace of Jay Chou, I might add), the train we took to Dan Shui from XiMenDing was similar to our MRT, though it was visibly older, but still very efficient!
Upon alighting, we took the ferry to the fisherman's wharf, we could even pay for the ferry ride using their Easy card (now we know where Singapore gets the name Ez-link card from -.-).
Though it was a small town, we spent almost the entire day walking around and soaking up the atmosphere. Perhaps it was the weekend, the whole place was crowded everywhere we went! Only the main street felt tourist-y, most of the town was very tranquil and peaceful to a certain extent. We even found the place where Jay filmed his MV for the song 退後 ;)
Unfortunately, it was cloudy that day and we couldn't see the beautiful sunset that Dan Shui is famous for. It even drizzled at some point.
Dan Shui at night was as lively, if not more lively then it is in the day:
We didn't stick around for dinner though as we wanted to head to Shilin Night Market for dinner, the traveling time back to central Taipei took almost an hour.
We reached Shilin market around 9pm, but there was still huge crowds and the entire place was still very lively.
The first long queue were saw was the Fried Chicken Chops, it was huge, and it cost only S$2. They had a very efficient queue system where one of the stall assistants handed out the paper bag to everyone in queue, so that the moment you reach your turn, all you had to do was tell them how many you want, and pay.
I think we got served within 5 minutes.
We also tired their version of a western meal, this was their steak, which was also huge and I think it cost us less than S$4. By the time we hit our third/fourth stall, we were already bloated, which was a pity because the market is huge and there're still loads of things to eat!
By the time we were done with our food hunting, it was close to 11.30pm and we managed to catch one of the last trains back to our hotel. Eventful(l) day it was.
