Tonight we stopped by a snack market, featuring tasty treats like fried scorpions, boiled starfish, crunchy lizards, seahorse kebabs, silkworms, whole baby squid, and, you know, magical wands of candied fruit. No big deal.

The scorpion photo is a little bit blurry because they were wiggling. The get threaded onto a bamboo skewer when they're still alive

The open kitchen at Din Tai Fung is packed floor-to-ceiling with bamboo baskets, steam wafting frantically through the air as a dozen chefs, equally frantic, scoop filling and pinch dough into bulbous half-moons. The world-famous dumpling restaurant has two locations, and I am sitting on a vinyl bench outside of the take-out area at the branch at Shin Kong Place, a six-floor shopping mall that flaunts designer brand names at stratospheric prices.