First night in Taipei

Tonight I went to the Shilin Night Market here in Taipei.  To get there I had to take the MRT.  It was just a short walk from my hotel.  Everything is in both Mandarin as well as English so it was easy to get around.  I only almost got on the wrong train just once.  Something to note, you should not take the Taipei MRT if you don't like being in crowds of people.  You literally just move en mass through the station and then onto the train.  Once on the train there is no need to even hang on since you are packed in like sardines.  It would normally creep me out to be this close to people but it was actually a very orderly process. 

Shilin Night Market is a huge market where you can buy all sorts of clothing, shoes, jewelry, as well as ton of food.  Some of the food looked really good and some looked and smelled horrible.  And by horrible, I mean the nauseatingly bad.  As with most Asian markets, there was quite a bit of raw meat and fish sitting around.  There were also a bunch of stalls selling cooked chicken necks and feet and who knows what else.  The Asians are pretty good at not wasting much when it comes to food.  I wasn't hungry so didn't eat anything but I had a great time walking up and down looking at all of the different stalls.

One of the things that always amazes me about the food stalls in Asia are how much output there is from such a tiny space.  Here is a sign from a stall that was probably no larger than a bathroom that would fit under a staircase:

The other side of the market is where all of the clothing shops are located.  The entire market was super busy but the clothing side was by far the busiest.  I'm hoping this picture gives you an idea of the amount of people I was walking through the market with:

What made matters worse is that there were tables in the middle of the walking path.  There were people standing on stools keeping an eye out for what I thought were customers.  What I realized a little bit later was that they were the lookouts for the police.  At one point, the guys and gals standing up on the stools starting yelling at each other and within a matter of about a minute the tables were all packed up and gone.  It was really interesting to watch and clearly they were selling illegally.  The police were patrolling pretty well after that point so it made it much easier to walk around. 

I wandered around the market for a couple of hours.  I did pick up a couple of things since it is hard to pass them up at such good prices.  My day started out pretty early today so am heading to bed early.  More to come from touring tomorrow...