Kenting
So we also made a pit stop in Kenting. According to Trip Advisor folklore, Kenting was supposed to be poppin. But Taiwan is just a little too north of the equator and it has more seasons than Thailand. Thus the Taiwan winter meant lots of big Chinese Tour Buses with lots of Chinese families, no party people, and cold beaches.
We actually drove by a bus crash, which looked pretty frightening!
But it was still pretty and my first taste of one of those “Taiwan Night Markets”. Thus we ended up changing our plans and left a day early to Taipei!
Tam Sui - 淡水
It’s like a day market that lines a port, they literally call it Fisherman’s Wharf for the SF inclined. We got sugar cane juice, ice cream burritos, these weird tofu bricks, giant ice cream cones, these really gelationous jelly fish looking things that are basically boiled chinese bbq pork encased by rice flour. You know what, let me just show you pictures.
But before I do, here’s the infamous turkish ice cream guy. I literally had a BALL just watching him. He is a true performer, and you can tell that he genuinely enjoys his job. Apologies for the vertical iPhone footage.
Picture time:
Annnd this is one of many “American” fashion faux pas that we witnessed. The Taiwanese love their patterns lol.
Mango Shaved Ice - 芒果冰
So apparently the Taiwanese are responsible for the invention Pearl Milk Tea (or as my friends and I like to call it: BubzTea). But on top of this amazingly delicious fattening drink, they are also the creators of the equally unhealthy mango shaved ice.
According to Thomas’ uncle, there was a year where mango yield was just off the charts, so they had so much extra mango and couldn’t sell it because market value was so low, that some farmer started selling mango shaved ice and it just took off.
Unfortunately, shaved ice hasn’t particularly taken off in America. This is not your typical snow cone shaved ice, its more of a creamy fine grained texture. It might as wellnot be called ice. We went to 3 mango shaved ice places through out the trip, and each place was so different! Some of them have the mango infused with the shaved ice, some of them had a mixture of a brown sugar infused shaved ice that had thicker chunks? In any case, they were all delicious and the mangos were on point. It is interesting to see how different Taiwanese mango was from Thai mango… I gotta say I like the Taiwanese mango more hehe.
Jeremy Lin ate at the place where we got the mango shaved ice pictured below!
I can’t seem to find the picture of the last mango shaved ice, but it was at the infamous Monster Ice, and was absolutely delicious. We also ordered a bubble milk tea flavored shaved ice, which was bomb diggity, and offered a nice contrast to the almost overly sweet mango.