Taipei Day 4 : Jiufen & Shifen

I am FINALLY covering my Day 4 trip in Taiwan~!

Oh yes, this is one of my favorite Taiwan bits. We went up to the northern-est part of Taiwan, Shifen, Jiufen and Keelung! I seriously am in LOVEEEE with every bit of them! Get ready for lotsa foodporn! We tried quite a number of food/snacks in Jiufen and while some are amazing, some, not so.. More on this soon!

I started my day forgetting to bring my train card so we all had to learn how to work the ticket machine, which was kinda new for us. There were lotsa buttons and Chinese words it was so confusing to me. We had no idea how to work it until two super nice aunties gave us a demo.

So after settling the issue with tix, we took the Taiwan Railway (TRA) from Taipei Main Station to Ruifang Station because it seems to be the easiest option. There are buses too though it will still take about the same time to reach Ruifang.

We headed to Jiufen first, cause I read that if we got there late we probably will miss out on some of the stalls there. From Ruifang, we opted for the taxi which costs about 150NTD.

And we have arrived~! The entrance to Jiufen Old Street is towards the left of the temple in this pic.

The view ohmaigawd. So prettay!!

This is why Jiufen is known as the Santorini of Taiwan!

After a while, we were finally at Jiufen Old Street and boy, was there quite a crowd already!

The quieter lane.

It was a super duper hot day and before long I was feeling freaking thirsty. Underestimated Taiwan's summer...

Walked around and caught a sniff of these sweet smelling pink guavas. Bought it immediately and they're so yummyyyy!! Gotta be one of my favorite fruit juice now!

Pink guava juice was served in a Doraemon-shaped container, how cute!

My friends were hungry and bought this Taiwan-style Chinese sausage. At first I didn't want to try but they told me it is very different from the ones back home. Kinda yum!

We took quite a while covering that part of the lane but somehow missed this store selling Birds' nest. They were demonstrating how to prepare the cubed bird's nest. That caught our interest and we ended up buying quite a number of packs. I shared my haul in one of my earlier post.

(I'm actually making this as I'm writing this post. Multitasker, ceh wah. Darn the effort to dissolve the rubix cube!)

We got hungry and decided to try this restaurant we saw in the main intersection of the lanes. Initially I wanted to try the chu char style a.k.a. Chinese-style cook to order restaurants but that would mean we have to get back to where we started so Plan B: Any restaurant in sight so we can plonk our tired arses and fill our stomach.

We ordered braised chicken because it looked like the shop's specialty to miss and the dish had an interesting name in Chinese LOL. Tasted quite normal, but succulent! We also had Xiao Long Bao too because we haven't had any of these in our first few days of our trip.

Later was more exploring at the other end of the lane, which also means more food LOL. Like, how could we not explored this lane first? The feymes dessert shop was just a lil' walk away! Luckily we were in group so we shared two bowls of mixed flavored balls among ourselves.

And left our mark there too LOL. It wasn't me!!

Next we came across this BBQ Mushroom stall. An awesome colleague, CH, recommended this to me and so I was like, why not? I think it's very flavorful and succulent but I'm no fan to heavy mushroom-y flavor.

Some walking later and bracing through the growing human traffic, a shop selling pinkish meatball wrapped in jelly crust caught my attention. Seeing the queue, which to Malaysians are sign of pretty awesome food alert, I signaled my one friend who wasn't lost in the crowd LOL to stop join the queue. Nearing our turn, we got more excited, seeing the lady in front of us had ordered 7 bowls of this meatball.

We ordered one because obviously, from all the bits here and there, we were closed to adding an inch of belly size LOL.

Luckily, because it was the not so nice things I've tried. I'm calling it ‘The Blob’ now. Us girls didn't like it so poorr Ben had to finished it. He remarked the meatball didn't taste as bad as the blob outer. Yeah right.

One of the interesting shops we came across included this traditional candy shop decorated in old-school setting. Pretty awesome!

Close to the end of the lane, we finally found the peanut ice cream stall! It's in my MUST EAT list.

Looks pretty meh here but OMG, so YUMMYYY!!!!

Stood at an emptier corner omnomnom-ing and savoring every single bite.

~ ❤ ~

Wayyy past noon and we were so beat, so time to relax at no other than Ah Mei Teahouse!

We got ourselved seated on the rooftop balcony for the sake of enjoying the view :D

We simply ordered tea, some 'Mei Ren Cha' or Pretty People Tea. Yeah, quite a name.

Once our order arrived, the waitress showed us the proper way of preparing our tea and we tried our best to reproduce the steps. Obviously I was too busy snapping away to remember any of them. I sat at the other end so my friends who were sitting beside the kettle prepared the tea and we laughed at their miserable attempts and at our pretentious and lack of graciousness while drinking the tea LOL

Tea is ready!

After a good rest, off we headed to Shifen~!

...or so we thought. We found a sign leading to the Gold Museum. You bet we dropped by.

and spent over an hour there because my friends were obsessed in the 'gold mining'.

It wasn't exactly gold but some sorta tiny, metallic bits. Don't have a pic on this tho.. I helped my friends mine because they wanted some for souvenirs LOL

~ ♥ ~

Shifen

It was closed to 6PM when we reached Shifen. We took taxi which costs us almost over RM100 for the ride! Though we thought that would be faster than waiting and boarding the train. On the way, we were treated by hill-y/mountain-y views which was awesome :D

Greeted by this view as soon as we reached.

Super wow.

The only reason we were there beside sight-seeing was to release our own lantern! We simply chose the closest shop as I've checked on other blogs stating that most shops charge about similar price.

Next is simple to choose the type of 'wishes' we want to make.

First, gotta scribble our wishes! (Below: Some weird stuff my friend scribbled)

And then it's releasing time!

Train passing by so we had to move aside. It's a railway after all LOL

And that's just the first part of our day. I wanted to continue but this post alone is getting ridiculously long mostly from the pics hahaha. Part 2 coming up next, and it is going to be another post with lotsa food porn. Till my next post then~!