Currently the sun sets in Taichung at around 18:00. This means people have dinner early and the evening feels really long. One of my favourite activities for a long evening is to walk around in the nightmarket. There I can taste different food, and look at the large choice of shops. I can get anything from handbags or shoes to funny cases for mobile phones.

Here I took yummy fried squid (or sth similar) with rice filling as takeaway to eat at home. It was a really big dish:

Taiwanese people seem to like pets: This guy takes his cat along for buying food at the nightmarket. In the background you can see the shop where I had bought the squid from the picture above.

On the same evening I saw a shop using parrots to attract attention:

As students in Taiwan don’t cook (the dormitory rooms have no kitchen!), we have to get food from the nightmarket or restaurants every day. This means  we have to be aware of our budget: Everyday eating in expensive restaurants would be a financial disaster. 😉

Mr 38 – a curry restaurant in Feng Chia area – is not one of the cheap places. But my seafood dish topped with melted cheese was sooooooo yummy!!! I definitely want to eat that dish again. My choice was one of the more expensive ones, some basic curries are cheaper.

The servings  at Mr. 38 are very big – at least that is was us girls thought. Kenjiro couldn’t get enough and finished what we had left over:

This is another restaurant we tried: The menu was in Chinese without pictures, but the waitresses were really helpful and suggested some dishes. What we finally ordered was mainly noodle soups with different flavours and different kind of noodles. We decided to share all the dishes so that we can try everything. It was a really nice meal:

A very typical dish in Taiwan is “hot pot“. I had already tried that last year and was happy to try it again last week. Hot pot is a pot of hot water that will still cook on the table. Before eating one has to wait until the ingredients are fully cooked. The shop offered different sauces to choose from as a dip for the things from the hot pot. Many restaurants in Taiwan offer tea for free in addition to lunch or dinner, so did the hot pot restaurant.

A really nice way to eat is to share many dishes with a large group of people. This way one gets to try many different tastes. We did that on Friday in a big restaurant at the crossing Fuxing road/ Henan road. This is really close to my dormitory:

This evening I will maybe eat at the nightmarket again… yummy!