Bubble Tea is milk tea with a bunch of tapioca balls at the bottom. Taichung is one of the cities that claims to be the birthplace of the famous drink, so one of the first things we did here was to visit the local tea house claiming to be the original inventor: Chun Shui Tang Siwei. You can read about the bubble tea origin debate here: Who invented bubble tea?
Although the Chun Shui Tang bubble tea prices were very high for Taiwan (170 TWD compared to 50-60 TWD at most other places), we decided to have dinner here. Both the bubble tea and food turned out to be really good (especially the Beef Noodle Soup which had an amazingly rich broth). Since it had been a cold rainy day, the sit-down dinner with warm soup and sweet chewy bubble tea made for a perfect way to end the evening.
Not far from our hotel, there was a small street dedicated to anime, called Animation Lane. Since we had such a nice time visiting the art areas of Kaohsiung, we decided to check it out. The animation lane area was fairly small, but the art is really nicely done. When we were there, you could also see the sketches of their next project in the works for Dragon Ball.
The rest of our time in Taichung was spent walking the streets of the city where we saw temples, historic Japanese buildings, craft markets, parks, and a really fun dessert place called Miyahara that looks like it was teleported here from Harry Potter.
As usual, we finished our day at Yizhong Night Market. Our favourite dishes at this night market were a warm Korean-style seaweed purple-rice roll with kimchi & pork floss (really good and not greasy!) and an egg-cheese-thai-basil scallion-pancake sandwich (greasy but crispy, chewy, and so tasty).
