Taipei 2019 Day 01
Off to Taiwan! Due to some unforeseen circumstances regarding my Army activation period, we were able to travel to Taiwan. While at first disappointed that I would not be able to spend the whole time with the family in KL and subsequently Penang, I nevertheless was very excited with the prospect of heading to the Republic of China, my first trip to the land of Taiwan.
Booking a late afternoon flight, we landed in Taipei Int. Airport at night, where we proceeded to grab a taxi, and head towards the hotel, Via, right at Ximending!
Some slight scouting near the hotel area already made us very excited. I saw a Tiger Sugar stall quite literally steps away from the hotel entrance, as well as more famous fried chicken chains popular in Taiwan.
After such, we entered the hotel and immediately helped ourselves to the pantry, where there was free flow drinks and a small selection of Taiwanese snacks.
We decided to have a quick rest inside the hotel room before heading for Ximending proper and heading for dinner after that as well. The hotel was neat and surprisingly had one of the nicest bathrooms we had ever seen, clean and included a bathtub.
After our short rest, we headed out of Via Hotel, towards Ximending, where we did a short tour of some claw machines before heading for dinner.
Dinner would be at one of my shortlisted places. I convinced the family to try out ” 马辣顶级鸳鸯火锅 ” or Mala Hot Pot in the heart of Ximending. As the rest of my family were not huge fans of Mala, and Ashley could not really take spicy food at all, they were at first hesitant to try it out, but I decided that we could just not order Mala. However, we ended up ordering one Mala base and one collagen base due to the lack of other options that interested us.
Here, we found our first gripes with the ordering system in Taiwan. Although we could understand the language, sometimes the systems for ordering in restaurants is completely foreign to me. For example, we were told we had “3 orders” of any meat of our choosing, but we could not figure out whether that meant we could only order a maximum of 3 quantity per order, or whether that meant we could only order from the staff for a maximum of 3 times. It has since been many days, and we still cannot figure it out.
No matter, the food arrived and it is absolutely amazing. Not only were the meat delectable and fresh, the mala base was also surprisingly good. No going back to other Mala based soups in Singapore, this was a league above the rest easily. The seafood was also an easy win. The amount of options that were available and the quality of the fish was amazing, and we were happily surprised with the quality of the food.
For desserts, the restaurant also offered what seemed like an impossibly large amount of ice-cream from haagen-daas. Never before have we seen such a large collection, 4 freezers and with 4-6 flavours each, all from haagen-daas. We loaded up on some ice-cream before heading back and calling it a day for our first day in Taiwan.
