I would not believe it had I not seen it myself in Taipei.

For loyal readers of our website, you may recall a post from early October, where I commented on the size of Tokyo. In particular, it would take a city of Tokyo’s size to be able to support an Accordion club. Fast forward about seven weeks and we are in Taipei with a population of about 2.7 millioin. I was amazed to see this site while strolling back from a flower market.

Maybe it is a regional thing? Now to be clear, I was NOT looking for this shop, or this type of instrument. I’m not sure what the music craze here is, however, I don’t think it is this. For curiosity, I Googled the name. Sure enough, they offer lessons, including on line lessons. Wow.

Night Market

We’ve seen some other interesting things here in Taipei, including the famed night markets. The crowds were almost oppressive last night, a Saturday. Meg and I certainly brought the average age up. It was difficult to order food as there are very few signs in English and Goggle translate is often lacking. Case in point, at lunch earlier in the day, we ordered what translated to crispy sausage. We are not sure what we received, it was likely heart and it certainly wasn’t crispy. We both tried it and left the rest. 

Xiaomi night market

At the night market, we were hungry as our walking tour had just ended. We did manage to order chicken, well I did. All I did was point and hand over some money and the clerk passed us a bag of fried chicken nugget like things. The signs all around this stall had pictures of chickens. Normally night markets are delicious, however we did not get half way through these nuggets before we threw them out. After that we were a bit gun-shy and, even though we walked around for another 45 minutes, we did not order anything.

Restaurant dinner

We returned to our hotel prior to going to a different night market close by. All the stalls were busy, however there was almost no English at any of them. There was a lot of food which looked as if it came from the parts of animals we, as North American’s, don’t normally eat. In the end, we chickened out and headed to a rather busy sit-down restaurant and had a delightful meal.