Just around umbrella cat corner is one of Taipei's fantastic night markets, which is slightly busier.
There's a whole lot of food going on.
Some of which is not easy to identify.
I tucked right into a stick of candied tomatoes with prunes. It was, well, good enough to eat despite the obvious throat impalement while walking risk.
Barry had the much wimpier bubble tea.
I also tried this, which is congealed pig's blood with sticky rice. Good, but strange to me that it was served at room temperature, sometimes with peanuts. I figured it should be a part of a hot breakfast.
Again you'll see the trend of my heroic bravery. Here I'm liking, but not really understanding Stinky Tofu.
Whereas Barry's enjoying much less adventurous beef noodle soup.
He is also shown here trying to figure out which one is the mortar, and which the pestle, at a grind-you-own sesame seeds Japanese restaurant.
Later on, we found the best dumplings in all of Asia, and bought 30 of them to eat over the next few days. Our rapture made us forget photography.
In Northern Vietnam, you can travel into the past.
Ok, not really. Here, the Black Hmong woman is talking on her cellphone.
And the outfits are better in colour (I think this tribe is Giay or Zay).
In our hotel, the traditional garb of each hill tribe is explained.
Mostly, we saw the Black Hmong, below. They were best at pushing their wares, which were, sadly, trinkets made in China (or perhaps in Vietnamese factories, but not in hill tribe villages).
Some of the food for sale was more local, however.
Also available were Red Dao, shown below.
What to eat?
Perhaps some seafood?
Hanoi provides fascinating chaos and great pictures of bikes.
And motorbikes. Here, a whole fridge on one.
Here, 6 ducks. Probably more, not shown.
We took the fancy overnight train north through the mountains, for 9 hours.
Luckily, they still had Vietnamese coffee when we got there.
Barry was pretty happy about that!
This is different, a man with a 
Here some sort of story is told involving a dark, poorly-clad bad guy who appears to be stealing the young.
Most temples have what I call the hairy gods as shown here (hair alarmingly real-looking), but this 
And decorating ideas - don't you think we should have more ceilings like this?
And see the little tiny buildings below.
Um, excuse me, there seems to be an old drunk man on top of your temple.
Anyway, back to fish. After flaunting its taxidermy,
the museum has beautifully illustrated fish ball details in Mandarin!
What could make you hungrier than this balling technique?
We were careful not to mess with the intricate displays.
Overall, the 
