Taiwan Day 1: Zhulin Buddhist Temple and Taoyuan Lantern Festival

Hello Taipei!

It took me a few days to recover from the pagod and puyat from our Taiwan trip but now that I’m catching up with our regular routine here. I can finally say that I’m back to regular programming! Woohoo! Of course, first up in my long list of kwento is our first day there..

This trip is our first trip out of the country as a family of four. Our first was years ago in Hongkong as a family of three. So why Taiwan, you might ask? Well, we were invited by my cousin who has an apartment there. (Thank you, ate Myra!) Since I’m curious about their streetfood, I thought why not?

When we arrived at the airport… Taiwan pala has lots of “crane” and “egg” machines and Twinkle saw the first one before we got into the Taipei MRT. Ayun, napabili na agad kami… Ykaie naman got excited that there’s a vending machine of books.

Anyway, we thought it wouldn’t be as cold in Taiwan as we first thought but we still brought a couple of winter clothes. It turned out to be a good thing because it was really cold in Taoyuan. As a matter of fact we needed some handwarmer too.

Sis bought these cutie patootie handwarmers online for Twinkle…

But you can buy regular ones like this naman in any convenience store or supermarket there….

Our itinerary was taken cared of by my sister who calls herself Anney. And supposedly, day one is gonna be spent at Daxi Old Street. My niece, Missie, who’s our tour guide for the day, said it’s too far and since it’s a bit rainy, we figured we’ll just go somewhere near.  She took us to Zhulin Buddhist Temple instead. But not after having lunch at Formosa Chang first.

Read on: Lunch at Formosa Chang

Zhulin Buddhist Temple

Zhulin Buddhist Temple is a well-known temple that has an elegant architecture…

 

Street Food Outside the Temple

I saw two interesting streetfood right outside the temple…

The first one is this: Ice cream. Not just regular ice cream, It’s Blueberry ice cream wrapped in lumpia wrapper together with crushed peanuts, chopped spring onion, chopped cilantro. It was weird eating the ice cream with the cilantro but what’s surprising is that it actually went well together. This ice cream costs: NT$40

Taiwanese Tapioca Cubes (NT$100) – This is very much similar to something that I eat when I was a child. The difference is that these comes in different flavors. The texture is like a mixture of gummi and mochi. Twinkle loved the pink ones.

Taoyuan Lantern Festival

Our next stop was the Taoyuan Lantern Festival.. It was set along the stretch of a bank of the Nankan River and featured colorful and playful lanterns.

After taking photos with the lanterns, we headed to the nearby night market to check out some food!

This fried squid is really good! I had Lemon Salt and Pepper but there are other interesting flavors like Seaweed Mayonnaise, Thai Chutney, Cheese Salad, and Honey Mustard. (NT$100)

Fresh and Sweet Strawberry drizzled with condensed milk (NT$60)

…And my first Milk Tea in Taiwan. I heard Milk Tea is good around these parts but this one that I’ve tried at the Taoyuan Lantern Festival is just so-so for NT$35.

That concludes our first day…

Happy Hump Day to you!