Sunday in Ban Qiao 板橋 - 15 Mar 09

After a very eventful Saturday, I headed out again on Sunday, this time to Ban Qiao 板橋 in Taipei county... many thanks to Justian and Yue Guang from YZLC for being my tour guides that day :)

Ban Qiao is the largest and most developed area in Taipei county, and is also where the County government is located... interestingly, the building is open to the public so we headed to the top floor (oops I don't remember which floor it is) to check out the view...

it's clearly quite a tall building for us to have such a superb, unobstructed view of the surroundingsfrom this next photo, I am sure you can roughly guess the ratio of scooters to cars in Taipei :)

After that, we headed for lunch and on the way we came across THIS!!
a store selling Singapore fried noodles, rice and Bak Kut Teh!! haha... we didn't eat there though, which was probably a good choice cos I did enjoy our lunch: hungarian beef noodles :)

Our post-lunch itinerary involved total immersion into chinese culture so we headed on to the Lin Family Mansion and Garden (林家花園) - chinese names always sound funny when translated to English, don't you think?... you can read more about the history of the place at http://www.tonyhuang39.com/tony0500/tony0500.html.. there are loads of photos there and in my Facebook album (link will be at the end of this post) so at this point, I shall just feature these 2 shots from the garden:


This guy was just one of the many people painting in the area.. do you see the resemblance between his painting and the real thing?

the environment there was really great and we ended up spending almost 2 hours there, simply because it was so relaxing and conducive for conversations... (p.s. from now till 31st May, entrance to the garden is free as long as you produce a receipt from any other shop in Taiwan)

So if you happen to drop by Ban Qiao, remember to visit the garden, and while you're there, ask for directions to a store selling cuttlefish soup... if you get to the market area, it's hard to miss because there's always a looooong queue... but well, if there's cheap and good food, the queue will be worth it :)

Carrot cake (HUGE!) for only NTD 15 and cuttlefish soup (overflowing with cuttlefish!) for only NTD 35!!!

So yes these were definitely the highlights of my trip to Ban Qiao 板橋 :)

For more photos, check http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=231685&id=576355703&l=b45c83980a

p.s. finally I have cleared my backlog of updates
p.p.s. I just realised that most of my trip updates feature food :)