China, Taiwan Launch Direct Links (大三通上路)

Today China and Taiwan launched daily flights, new shipping routes and postal links — the so called Three Links (大三通) — after 60 years of separation!

I didn’t think that these would happen this soon or even during my lifetime, but it all happened today. Now it only takes 82 minutes to fly from Taipei (台北) to Shanghai (上海) and 150 minutes to Beijing (北京). To get a better idea of what these data mean: It’ll be fast to fly to Shanghai than to take the bullet train from Taipei to Kaohsiung (高雄). Imagine that!

Now going visiting in China becomes easier than ever, and that should help a lot of Taiwanese families separated by spouses’ jobs. Currently the flight tickets are still too expensive to make the weekend commute feasible.  However, I believe that eventually the prices will drop to a more reasonable level and that will help all the broken families. Plus, this should help Taiwanese economy that has worsen since 90’s and make it less likely for China to take over Taiwan by force.

Some things ARE getting better in the middle of the world economy meltdown!

Raohe Street Night Market (饒河街夜市)

After getting back from the long bus tour at 9:30pm, I was so tired that I was ready for bed after a goods shower. Just when I went to my sister’s room to say Good Night, she asked me if I wanted to go grab some road stand food, 大腸包小腸, with her and her friend later. My first thought was, “Nah, I’m too tired for that.” Having fun required a lot of energy, and I had burned all mine during today’s bus tour. But after a second thought, I changed my mind. I won’t have this kind of opportunities at home if I have the energy. So at about 11:00pm, off we went to Linjiang Street Night Market (臨江街夜市) to search for the road stand food that they had in mind.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the road stand that her friend had in mind, so we had to visit another night market to see if it was there. BTW, this was my first visit to Linjiang Street Night Market, but we only spent about 5 minutes and took off. Bummer.

Off we went to Raohe or Jaoho Street Night Market (饒河街夜市), another one that I had never visited. This one seemed to be bigger and better planned than the last one as you could see from the photos of its entrance. There were several artificial Christmas trees leading to the entrance, and a couple of giant cute owls as its mascot. At first I was a bit puzzled why they picked up such an un-Chinese animal as its mascot, but then it struck me: Night markets were for night owls! Dudh! They really picked up a perfect mascot.

This time her friend found the road stand she were searching for, but by then we all want to have the famous Chinese medicine pork chop soup (十全藥燉排骨陳董藥燉排骨) first due to the chilly weather. She went to talk to the owner how late she would stay (the road stand was right next to the soup place); the owner answered midnight and told her to have soup first and came back for her food later. So we happily enjoyed the delicious soup.

When my sister remembered to check the time, we were shocked how late it was — 11:52pm! She suggested her friend to get the road stand food before the owner packed her stand, but her friend thought that was not gonna happen. And by the time she finished 3 bowls of soup (just 1 bowl with pork chops), sure enough, my sister’s warning was fulfilled — We saw the road stand owner already packed everything and was in the middle of cleaning! And it was 12:03am! *sigh* 真是哀怨…

Oh well, so once we were done and highly satisfied with our soup, we slowly walked towards the entrance and did some window shopping. Most of non-food related road stands and stores were still open. Plenty of cute and weird stuff was at affordable prices, such as this squished Hello Kitty piggy bank.

We walked by a cartoon cake (脆皮雞蛋燒的卡通雞蛋糕) road stand. The owner was ready to pack to go home once he sold the rest 7. I was always nuts about this kind of cakes since I was a kid, all forms and shapes. Her friend didn’t think that the cakes looked all that good, so even if the owner would give us a discount if we bought all 7, she would only get 5. As she took a bite of Hello Kitty, she immediately regreted that she didn’t get all 7… We had never had such excellently made cartoon cake in our lives! It was crispy outside and soft and fragrant inside, just exactly the way it should. But that was all right; now we knew where to find the perfect cartoon cake later. Too bad that I didn’t take a photo of the prettier 2 cartoon characters — Doraemon (a famous blue robot cat in Japan and Taiwan) and Hello Kitty — before everyone started attacking hers. These two in the photo were not as pretty as the other 3, but I’ll have to prove to you next time when we visit the road stand again.