2019 Taipei Lunar New Year Festival at Dihua Street, Datong District

Of the 6D/5N spent exploring Taiwan, the time allocated to explore Taipei, its capital city, was exceedingly short.

However, I was pleased that during my visit, it was the start of the 2019 Taipei Lunar New Year Festival, an annual CNY bazaar that caters to the festive shopping crowd.

Dihua Street in Datong District (Dadaocheng) attracts a good number of tourists on a normal day for its many tea rooms; local, hippy and Western-influenced cafés.

Accordingly, every year, before Chinese New Year, one of the mega Taipei Lunar New Year Festivals is hosted here, drawing a massive number of visitors on a daily basis.

I have been to my fair share of night and morning markets, but this is in a class of its own – with respect to the number of vendors, range of goods, and quantity that is being sold.

As this is a festive bazaar, most of the goods sold are those that Chinese need to usher in the Lunar New Year, such as sweets, candies, nuts, waxed meat, holiday decorations and other traditional items, unlike regular night markets that Taiwan is famous for.

This year’s Taipei Lunar New Year Festival to welcome the Year of the Boar wraps up on 3rd Feb. I understand that throughout the 2+ weeks of festive shopping, different programmes have been lined up. For event information, check this official page.

In this post, I share with you random photos of the 2019 Taipei Lunar New Year Festival that I took during my visit. It was packed, but thankfully, the crowd did not block me from spotting the skewered bishop’s nose. That gave me a good laugh, indeed!

If you are in Taipei now or at least before 3rd Feb, 2019, do drop by Dihua Street in Dadaocheng to enjoy the pre-CNY festivities. The bazaar begins at 12 noon and ends on 12 midnight daily.

This trip to explore Taiwan was at the invitation of Ipoh’s premier travel agency, Golden Century Tour & Travel, with the support of and in collaboration with the Tourism Bureau of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Ground tour was handled by Polo Holidays Co. Ltd.

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