Street food in Danshui and ... English high tea?

Yesterday afternoon Roshana, Emma, and Kathryn and I met in Danshui for the express purpose of stuffing ourselves full of street food or "xiao chi", which translates to "small eats." The last time I went to Danshui I was with a strict vegetarian who was also experiencing a bit of culture shock, so needless to say we didn't try any food from the hawker stalls. I was jazzed to have a chance to eat weird things on sticks!

Deep fried mushrooms and squid!

Danshui has a mix of hawker stalls (semi-permanent structures) and truly mobile hawker carts.
One thing that you often see with hawker food, especially on the mobile carts, is that most of the food is pre-coooked to some degree. This saves space - no prep area - but it also means a faster turn-around when a customer orders something. The hawker typically just has to finish the order off with a quick deep fry or a few turns on the barbecue grill.

The hawker stall kitchen where it all happens!

I didn't get a picture of it, but there are some hawker carts that have small engines on them that power the cooking equipment. You can actually see the arms and pistons and belts and gears moving! It's fascinating. There's usually a rubber band or two holding everything together, too!

Almost everything is served on a stick, even things you normally wouldn't eat on a stick, like eggs. The Taiwanese freaking LOVE eggs and eat them almost every day. One special hawker treat is quail eggs on a stick. I tried them and they were ... eggs on a stick ... cold eggs on a stick. They were okay but I'm not sure I would have them again.

Quail eggs! I had some of these.

Kathryn and Emma had the fried potato crisps on a stick. They're kind of cool because the potato is cut into a continuous spiral and then fed onto the stick before being deep fried and seasoned. You could probably get more crisps for your money by buying them in a bag from the store, but the thing is, it's just fun to eat your crisps on a stick. That's worth it, right?

Kathryn got potato crisps on a stick, as well as the spring onion pancake you see in the stall behind her.

Ice cream is very popular. There are several soft serve ice cream stalls scattered throughout the hawker market. Kathryn and Emma tried vanilla and chocolate. They said that it didn't have a strong taste, nor did it taste like milk-based ice cream. It was probably some kind of non-dairy product. The berry-flavored ice creams were also very popular with locals. 

Kathryn and Emma got soft ice cream cones, a popular treat!

Toward the end of our food tour of Danshui, Kathryn got an iced fruit juice drink that was largely colored sugar water. That's very common in Taiwan. Natural sugar isn't sufficient - the locals top it up with fructose syrup until it's nearly undrinkable. 

I opted for sugar cane juice which you might be surprised to learn is not terribly sweet. At least, it's not sweet compared to the other "juice" options. It might be artificially colored, though, because I don't recall the sugar cane juice being such a bright green color when we drank it in Malaysia.

Sugar cane juice! It's very refreshing and not nearly as sweet as the other "juice" options.

After stuffing ourselves in Danshui we hopped on the MRT to head back into Taipei. I wanted to go to Yongkang Street by the Dongmen MRT station to shop for shoes. I'd been told by a colleague at work that there were some good shoe shops there. At first only Roshana was going to join me, then Emma and Kathryn decided to come along as well.

When we got to Dongmen there was a general consensus that it would be nice to sit down and have a drink - tea, not alcohol - and Roshana suggested the Rose House tea room. She'd walked by it numerous times on her way back from the university and had always wanted to try it. We decided to give it a go.

The Little Prince Afternoon Tea set.

It was a wood-paneled, heavily carpeted, and garishly floral English-style tea room with staff dressed in maid and servant uniforms. There were two menus - one for food, and one for tea and coffee. Roshana, Emma, and Kathryn were a bit peckish and decided to order afternoon tea. I figured in for a penny, in for a pound and joined them. We ordered two Little Prince Afternoon Tea sets - English sandwich, bacon "burger", mini quiche, creme brulee, English scone with clotted cream and jam, Scottish shortbread, fruit roll cake, cheesecake, rose lychee jelly, and rose macaroon. It was decadent. And, it was cheap - $10 per person including set gratuity.

The afternoon tea pretty much finished off Kathryn and Emma, so shopping was really out of the question after that. We dawdled down the street until we got back to Xinyi and the Dongmen MRT station, and decided to head our separate ways - the girls back to the World Scholar House hostel and me over to the Daan MRT and home in Dazhi.

And that, my friends, is how you eat in Taiwan - from hawker stall to English tea house in one day!