blood cake for you? night market madness

Saturday night we were off to the night market - full of food vendors and clothing shops, enough to make one's head spin. We had the Taiwanese-style shaved ice (see picture of mango ice) topped with plenty of condensed sweetened milk, red beans, chewy tapioca, and so on...it's quite famous and for me, a nostalgic food! We had some fried meat bun (肉まん）, a very tasty treat.


Then topped off the night with 豬血糕, pig's blood rice cake (made with glutinous rice and chicken's blood which gives it the distinguishing black color) dipped in sweet & spicy sauce, coated in peanut powder and green onions + cilantro (see picture). I am quite fond of it but Hiro didn't seem to catch on to the taste. In his words, 'it tastes like blood.' Well, I give him a heck of a lot of credit for eating it, very well knowing what it was...he's a real trooper in the sense that he'll try everything at least once.

Despite it having been Golden Week, there were virtually no foreign tourists (more notably, no Japanese) at the market. I asked my mom why and she said it was a market aimed at the locals.