Ximending | 西門町

We went back to our hotel to get some rest before heading out in the night to Ximending. Ximending is very crowded and most of the stalls are shops instead of the usual night market scene that we are used to seeing. We found an shop selling Fried Oysters as well as Rice Vermicelli in Cutterfish Soup. The Fried Oysters were certainly way better then those we had at Shilin. The Cutterfish Soup was alright, but largely due to us not really liking the taste of cutterfish itself.

I wanted to visit the 3 stories Watson in Ximending to get some facial products that weren’t available here in Singapore. And interestingly it was also the first time I realised that the Watsons runs for 24hrs.

We headed towards the Red House Area and we found a nice cosy bar where we had some drinks as well as some bar food. Our last night here in Taipei.

By the time we were done with our drinks, we had already missed our last train back to our hotel. We decided to rent a Youbike from the Youbike stations. There is two Youbike Station within the area of Ximending (you can find out more from their website). To rent a Youbike, you would have to either register your easy card with a Taiwan Number or pay using your credit card. We want for the credit card option as we only had one Taiwan Number. But it was only after our trip did we realised that each Taiwan Number was eligible to register up to 5 easy cards (trust me, if you can, registering your easy card is worth the hassle). To pay with the credit card, we had to first enter our details at the Kiosk with our credit card details. A word of caution though, check your bikes throughly before choosing your bike. One of the bikes we chose had a damaged bike stand, and we had to improvise by using a plastic bag to tie the stand up so that it wouldn’t drop.