Snake Alley

Went out with the two other Danish YEP Students today, and as a result of a short series of events, we ended up at Huaxi Street (Tourist) Night Market, also known as Snake Alley, to try out the places specialty.

Actually, although I have visited this place many times, I had yet to actually try the snake. (Joni, my first host mother often took me to visit her family here.) Also, I had not idea, we'd end up there. Ciarán, the bearded guy to the left, kind of owed a dinner to Fredrik and I, and probably didn't have much else to do today. And what an event it became. First we drank snake blood and snake soup, then went on to eat Matadormix amongst the homeless people in the area in front of Longshan Temple sleeping, gambling and talking English to us about how cold Finland is. Went to the temple to say hi to the Buddhist gods too at some point. Finally we went Taipei Main Station in search for non-Starbucks coffee and ended up eating pizza cones.

Back in snake land, these three glasses of snake-liquids are waiting to get an explanation. You drink the white liquid first. This is the snake poison. Then you advance to the green one, which is snake bile (this is the one I was most worried about, yet it wasn't very bad tasting). Finally you get to the red one, which is snake blood. The two pills inside are containing concentrates of snake blood. As with all things you can eat in Taiwan, snake has a number of good effects on your body. Especially it should be good for libido. Am sad to admit, that I am not currently in a position with great chances of testing that. However, I also heard some people are feeding their kids snake when they grow up, as it's believed to be very good to the skin.

As with all things Taiwanese, drinking snake blood is something many foreigners find really weird, exotic and often slightly gross or a test of manhood. I was actually expecting it to be kind of hard to swallow from what I've heard about it, but it wasn't really that bad at all. Perhaps was because there were a lot of water mixed in it, I can't tell, but the reason I probably wont go eat it again is more that I don't see the big deal in doing so, than being afraid of eating it. Even though it is a little strange to drink, Four Gods Soup beats it at any time.
The snake soup is something else though. While it does taste all right and not very much different from a light fish soup without too many Chinese medicines in it, at least 30% of the meat in the snake soup consists of bones, and they're everywhere and rather small. While a very good reason might convince me to go have another cup of snake blood in good company, I'm definitely not trying the soup again.

And that's it. Thanks for reading.