Noodle Festival & Taiwan Trade Show

After spending the morning at Taipei 101 we left to find the Noodle Festival. It was located in a park nearby so it was not a long walk but the weather was drizzley and miserable...just like Seattle.
Because of the weather the festival was a little crowded under the tents and canopies, but I'm getting back into the swing of things, so crowded is not so bad now.

We arrived a little later than we had wanted and the awards for best noodles had already been given out, but there were plenty of people still lining up at the vendor stalls to taste the noodles and different foods from all of the entrants.

I took this photo as this young chef was finishing making his handmade noodles and a little later I came back and shot a video of the whole process. I'll see if I can upload it here in the next post, but it's about 2 minutes long and may be too big for Blogger. We'll see.

We arrived at the noodle festival about 3pm and realized all of a sudden that we hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. The hunger pangs attacked us and we started feasting. We started off with noodle and beef soup in tomato broth and a big hunk of smelly tofu. Yup, I at half a brick of smelly tofu. Just goes to show how hungry I really was. We followed this with a green onion bread pastry and a beef pancake roll, and a bowl of dumplings. We wanted some bottled water next but both of the machines we went too took out money and gave us no drinks. :-(

We scored a couple of free tickets to the Taiwan Trade Show while in Taipei 101 so saundered over there hoping to find some freebies. What we found was another huge crowd.

The trade show ecompassed everything from coffee, wine, tea, food and food equipment, Taiwan souvenirs, and chain store goods. In all of that the best free stuff we could score was a sip of tea now and then and a chunk of pineapple cake here and there.

Chunnan did find a stall for the best tea cake vendor in all of Taiwan though, and he bought a box of their cranberry cakes for us to nibble on in the slow moments of the week still ahead of us.

Continuing my strange fruit odyssey, we found this vendor selling juice from this potato-like fruit called a Noni. The juice was thick and syrupy and bitter and tangy and fairly unpleasant. I'm not sure how they're going to market that unless it's to health food fanatics like Alie. After all, she drinks Grass Juice, so Noni Juice is probably a step up from that.

We also found this red top-shaped fruit called a Wax Apple. Chunnan had been wanting me to taste one for a few days but these here were like $4US each and he wasn't going to buy one at the price. As it turns out, at Chunnan's birthday party the next day, Momma served up a big plate of Wax Apples and they were quite tasty with a juicy, pear-like texture and a crisp clean taste.

Ok, we spent the whole day today at Chunnan's birthday party. I know it's not until the 25th, but we celebrated early since we'll be out of town on the actual day. I'll post more about that tomorrow. Now it's time for shower and bed.