Hwahsi Tourist Night Market

            Tourists, expats, and locals alike flock to this freak show.  Good food.  Good times.  Exotic foods are a highlight, many acting as an attraction for the target tourist.  Yes, we have bee larvae today.  This is not a standard Taiwanese dish, as far as I am aware.  So the foreign folk come to an exotic place and eat exotic food which doesn�t exist outside the locus of said and similar exoticism.

            Any how, the soubriquet Snake Alley Reveals the main event for most.  While dining in my regular haven, I sip honey tea and await my exotic meat of the evening while locals come for the tourist platter, which serves as the name states for the tourist, but is seen as medicine/health food/aphrodisiac to the local.  Others suffice simply for a bowl of snake soup.

The Snake Platter (clockwise from top) - Snake soup (very bony) - Snake�s blood (watered down and liquor-enhanced) - Snake�s venom (again watered down and alcoholized) - Snake�s semen (a la crushed up snake penis) - Ginseng extract (which is not snake-related) - 2 pills rumored to boost respiratory function (in case the venom isn�t watered-down enough perhaps?  I suppose an open sore in the mouth could transcend the venom from its aphro-medicinal function to its intended potentially lethal purpose).

            Other dishes include mouse, turtle, bbq snake, a small local mountain deer, ETCETERA.

The throng gathers outside however, to look at a giant python and whatever strange animal they have on display that evening.  Other establishments promise to kill the snake in front of you (and many other excited onlookers) upon order of a dish.  Others still, taunt cobras with sticks, keeping them irritated and stressed with outstretched hoods.  Unsympathetic shopkeepers smack these snakes causing them to strike out towards the audience.  I watched a girl walk through the small space between spectators and serpents as the cobra lunged out, only inches from a strike.

            And thus, the true exoticism lies in the atmosphere:

Tonight i'm out like a tout for hwahsi tourist market, otherwise dubbed snake alley.  My reflexologist is bringing me some dogmeat.
            But when i get there the dog's a no-show, the guy claiming 'out-of-season' one moment, and police raid the next.  No meat tonight, maybe in a few days (i.e. "no glot, clom fliday").  So i wind up eating sambar or muntjac or whatever that little deer-like thing running around the mountains is called.  Everyone else has snake's blood and soup, and there's a caged raccoon out front and a baby emu (* see addendum below) running around the place.
            Next door sells cream for rashed penii.  They give large-scale photographs of the different penis ailments their salve can cure.  And further on are large dried centipedes to be inserted into infected rectums.  Again, more large-scale photos of the target orifice.  i stared a while before i realized what i was looking at.  Down the side-alleys are what Sally calls "touch-tea," where scantily clad (older) babes serve you tea and then feel you off ('sip and tug' ?).

            A giant hog sits in a cage barely big enough for it to turn around in.  A miniature piglet paces about in a large hamster cage.  Crocodiles sit above tables watching you eat.  All novelty.

Down the way was a decent turtle shop.  The blood was pure here.  And the meat tender, but even bonier than snake.  Here is Taiwan.  And so, you must get over some not-so-humane methodology.  Turtles were de-shelled in one swift, tearing motion, and then hung head-down, their back-ends pierced on hanging barbs.  Next comes the swish of the blade as the turtle is bled from the neck into a cup waiting down below.  And all the while the limbs are still moving about.  IN-humane.  But, the food fetish...

The Turtle Platter

- Turtle soup (shell and all...while visions of salmonella danced through their heads...)

- Turtle�s blood (neat)
- Turtle�s gall-bladder extract
- Malleated Turtle ovary
- And a large anonymous pink capsule

            What else?  Frog soup comes to mind.  For $NT 60 a nice tangy broth is set before you with 3 whole frogs floating inconspicuously within.  No greasy and gristly tastes-like-chicken frog-legs like I�d had in the states.  Skin and all.  No mistaking those medium-sized frogs.  Even some of the young locals double-take and aiyee to the sight of the frogs.

back to taiwan notes back to what could be considered the table of contents on to the personal files of john

NEW! 03/03 Addendum: The baby emu is no longer a wee'un. It now stands about four feet high and roams the front area of the restaurant on a long leash. To prevent a guano-stained floor, the staff have strapped a plastic bag to the large bird's posterior.