Let's take it from the top:
On Friday, we hung around the Banchiao district and ate dumplings, drank some sweet fresh tomato juice, had "demos"at an English school, and mingled with some random English teachers:
Tofu appetizer with green onions and dumplings.
Seaweed salad, dumplings, fried green onion pancake.
Not shown: a pile of pan fried dumplings.
The makings of the dumplings and its maker.
On the way home.
We took an afternoon nap and then headed to the famous Shilin Night Market, where we took sticky photos on the way there, ate a ton of food (stinky tofu, deep fried chicken, octopus balls, candied strawberries and tomatoes), drank some lemon aiyu jelly and Taiwan beer from the 7/11 on the street (keeping it classy), and attempted to haggle at the many bag, shoes, clothing and jewllery shops that usually followed in this order:
1. Ask the shopkeeper "how much?" in broken Mandarin
2. Shopkeeper answers in Mandarin as they think that I understand; I don't understand
3. Shopkeeper sees that I'm a foreigner; punches digits in the always huge calculator, faces it towards me
4. I shake head in disagreement, attempt to haggle in English and hand gestures; it fails
5. I call Kristin over to translate and attempt to haggle through her
6. Furry of hand gestures, "whaddashesay?", broken Mandarin, calculator punching ensues until we do "the walk away" or we get the price we want.
This is a very good system.
Anyway, I bought some sneakers (on the outskirts of the market) because my flip flops were giving me crazy blisters. Also, we were going to hike a 1100m high mountain the next day....wuttt?
A mix of the p&s and the SLR, I found myself fairly cautious of pick pocketers so I took a small amount of photos :T
Anyway, we barely dented the market that night and will do it again...with vengeance.
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