9 May 2023
Steak night
A short walk to Sankeng and then back to Keelung for dinner
Believe it or not, a very traditional Taiwanese meal is steak. It is often served in night markets on a hot plate, just as I had it tonight in an all you can eat restaurant. It also sometimes served in a bag after being blow torched from frozen, but that is a different experience.
Some of the night market places take various off cuts and hammer them together to form a 'steak', where as the sit down all you can eat places advertise their steak as coming from... New Zealand. It seems Taiwan follows the motherlands lead and mainly imports food from New Zealand instead of Australia.
BTW, closed on Monday often extends to Tuesday, so much like Australia, if restaurants close 2 nights a week it is Monday and Tuesday. Steak was my 2nd choice after a fancy vegetarian place, which was closed on Tuesday.
Before settling on steak, I went for a walk that was shorter than I expected to the next station up the line at Sankeng. I am starting to realise that Keelung is a smaller place than I first thought.
Not many pics this evening, too many earlier today.
There are level crossings! This seems like a really really bad idea. They make the same noise as level crossings in Tokyo.
I walked along a rather interesting path up the middle of the tracks, undercover, and seemingly linking a school with the main part of Keelung. Before very long at all, I arrived at Sankeng station. It is probably closer to my hotel than Keelung station, which is to say, not far.
I get the feeling those that live at Sankeng are on the lower rung of the property ladder.
On my way back to Keelung, I stopped at the outdoor hi-fi shop. These really are for sale, they really are left outside overnight.
Here is my steak. It was about $15 for this steak, plus all you can eat salad bar, dessert bar, soft drinks and soft serve ice cream. This is the equivalent of 2 x cremia ice creams (I still have not recovered from the cremia ice cream price shock...). I am confident this will be the most expensive meal of this trip. The steak was surprisingly large, and surprisingly rare. They are always served on top of spaghetti and and egg, no choice! I put the salad on the griddle once I made room, and mixed it with the spaghetti. Also, despite the picture menu having English, this is the first place where there was absolutely no English spoken, to the point where my Chinese was better than their English. I had to choose how I wanted my steak cooked (medium, it came out blue...) and the sauce I wanted (tomato mushroom, which was strangely sweet so I didn't eat it). A very formally dressed Taiwanese lady at a nearby table came and told me about how it is all you can eat and drink, I had a brief conversation with here in Chinglish about how I can speak mandarin well enough, but struggle to understand the waitress when she talks too fast etc. she went back to her table and her kids were thrilled that their mother spoke to the weird foreigner.
Now after talking shit about talking Chinese, time to check on the night market. Much busier on Tuesday than Monday. More people, more stalls. There were a few foreigners around too, I think a cruise ship had arrived during the day.
Not a great pic, but these are little tomatoes. I think they are glazed in a sweet sauce. It is common when you buy fruit salad in Taiwan, China etc. that you get pineapple, melon, and tomatoes. They are technically a fruit I suppose.
Final pic for the night, more night market.