Last day of school was on a Thursday. Friday my Uncle Robert and Aunt Meihung took us (Lucy, Leo, my mom visiting from the states, and me) to Yilan for a day trip. Peter was still in Seattle. Yilan is only about 45 minutes away from us by car but we thought about bailing on the trip when it started to rain heavily Thursday afternoon. Luckily my uncle insisted we go anyway and we found that while it was rainig in Taipei, the weather was only partly cloudy in Yilan. The overcast skies were actually welcome as it probably would have been uncomfortably hot otherwise.
My uncle has lately been reading lots of food blogs and made a list of restaurants for us to try. It seems every city in Taiwan has it’s specialties that can’t be found elsewhere. So we went looking for breakfast first. Unfortunately we got to the breakfast place too late. They had already sold out of that morning’s food and closed up shop. But, it was around 10:30 so we went to a place he had in mind for lunch instead. Luckily that place was already open and welcoming customers. Here are some pix of what we ate:
After lunch we planned to go to a botanical garden, but when we got there we discovered it was tiny and didn’t have much to see so we went further up whatever road it was on and found a hiking trail. Unfortunately Leo flat out refused to go. He didn’t like that it was also a road and was concerned that any minute that a truck would come barrelling down I suppose. At any rate, Peter wasn’t around to carry him (and really, he shouldn’t be carried anymore anyway – he weighs 19kgs!) so after a while we turned back. The short walk we did get was pretty fun all the same.
As we drove away, we noticed a sign for some kind of recreational area by a lake. Sounded good so we headed that way. There we found a small lake nestled at the foot of some mountains. The Yilan area seems to have a number of these small lakes at the base of mountains. We rented a 4 person pedal car into which we stuffed all 4 adults as well as the 2 kids. There we passed a very pleasant couple of hours. In the middle of the lake was a tiny island with a footbridge leading to it. On the island we were treated to a very comfortable breeze. After two tours around the lake, we traded the pedal car for two bikes for the kids so they could play around a bit, and fed some ducks too.
Around 4pm we left the lake and decided to find some food. Uncle Robert again had the name of a restaurant handy – this time in Luodong which also happened to have a pretty well regarded night market. We decided to hit the night market first and then go to the restaurant. Taipei, and Taiwan in general is famous for its night markets. Despite living here almost two years we had yet to visit one so we were quite happy about it!
First we tried Ren Bing which I would have called a burrito, except the ingredients stuffed inside are decidedly Taiwanese and the outside pancake is extremely thin and made of high protein rice flour. We were lucky and got to watch them making the pancakes which seemed to be a matter of pulling a glob of wet, sticky, elastic dough out of a big bowl and then sort of throwing it on the hot plate and immediately pulling back thus leaving a thin covering of starch on the hot plate later to be peeled off.
Slap and pull!
Peel carefully!
Lots of vegetables!
We got to the night market in the late afternoon so it wasn’t busy yet. Nice relaxed time to visit. Later in the evening the street would be packed and sitting around at a table watching someone make renbing wrappers probably would not work. We also sampled lamb stew (which Lucy really liked surprisingly) and some onion pancakes that were among the best we’d ever tasted.
Finally we went to the restaurant, discovered it had closed, and then went to #2 on Uncle Robert’s list which was a sushi place to have some “real” dinner although we didn’t eat that much since we’d already done some snacking. 
Apologies for this post being so tardy by the way. I know it’s been almost a month since the actual day. Wrapping up the end of school and making decisions regarding next year has been tough. I have a backlog of posts and hope to have at least one a day over the next week or so to get caught up.
