For the past two days, it's been raining non stop in the great city of Taipei. Making it a gloomy place. The most determined of the backpacking crowd have had only enough enthusiasm to visit the museums, and found them crowded with bus loads of Chinese tourists. Others have stayed indoors. And the smallest, most elite group of hostel-goers, have soothed thier boredom with shopping therapy.
In Taipei, there is almost nothing you can't buy. The most popular destinations for clothing, cell phones, shoes, handbags, candy, alarm clocks, hairpins, puppies, fortune tellings, or unidentified meat products... are the night markets. The key thing there is night market. Good luck finding anything during the day. It's only after dark that the stalls appear. And there isn't any space left unused: the most crafty venders set up their stalls in stairwells or the tiny alleys between buildings.
While most Americans have long ago traded their greenbacks for plastic, at the markets, cash changes hands in the blink of an eye. The currency is straigtforward: bills for NT 100 and 1000, and coins for NT 1, 5, 10, and 50. Backpackers can easily get by on less than NT 600 a day (about $20). $1 is roughly equal to NT 30.
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