Liming Huanghun market is my go-to in Taichung

It's been a while since I wrote here, and most of that stretch went into building software, specifically a note-taking app for language learners like myself.

For the first few years living in Taichung, I only went to supermarkets. PX Mart, Carrefour, the usual. It's a strange thing to admit now, because one of the city's better-known traditional markets is a twelve-minute walk from my home, and I never once turned in that direction.

It wasn't the language. My Mandarin was limited back then and still is in many ways, but that was never really the block.

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The real reason was simpler and dumber: I stuck to what looked familiar. Carrefour, even after it changed hands and rebranded, was a supermarket I grew up walking past as a kid in Belgium. Familiar signage does something to you when you're already navigating a country that isn't yours.

Read also: Western Food Became My Comfort Food in Taiwan

Finding 黎明黃昏市場

Takeout in Taiwan is absurdly convenient, so there was never any practical reason to change. But I like cooking, and at some point 黎明黃昏市場, Liming Huanghun Market, became part of how I live here.

Now I walk over every couple of days for fresh vegetables, and somewhere along the way I turned into one of those foreigners every stall recognizes, thanks to the same backpack, the same two or three shirts on rotation, the same hat.

The first year, nobody said a word to me. I was just another face moving through the stalls. Then, without any clear point where it started, that silence turned into small greetings.

A vendor saying hello in English. Someone asking how I'm doing. It wasn't sudden. It just became a pattern I noticed after the fact.

That's the moment I'd point to if someone asked when Taichung started to feel less like a place I was staying and more like a place I live.

Not because of a restaurant that knows my order or a bar where the bartender remembers my drink, but because a handful of vegetable and fruit vendors in a covered market recognize the foreign kid from Belgium/Indonesia who shows up three times a week.

What it costs

Beyond the feeling of it, the market keeps surprising me on price. I spend around 200 NTD a trip, somewhere near 5.5 euros, and that covers about three days of vegetables. You can't buy a single apple in Belgium for that anymore (kinda, you get the point).

That gap says something about how differently the two places treat the market itself. In Belgium, it's usually a once-a-week event tied to a specific day and square:

Ghent's Vrijdagmarkt runs every Friday, Brussels has its Saturday and Sunday circuits, and most neighborhoods get one scheduled morning rather than a standing option.

It's closer to an occasion than a routine, something you plan a trip around. Taiwan's traditional markets run on a completely different rhythm. They open nearly every day or every other day, stock turns over constantly, and going isn't an outing so much as an errand woven into the week.

That difference in frequency is probably half the reason the produce stays this cheap and this fresh. Nobody is hauling home a week's worth of vegetables to survive until the next scheduled market day.

Once I got more comfortable with the routine, I started taking different walking routes there and back, just to see more of Taichung along the way.

I wanted to get this down mostly because it's the kind of shift that's easy to miss while it's happening. If you're a foreigner living in Taichung, or anywhere in Taiwan with a real traditional market nearby, it's worth going for more than the produce, good as the produce is.

It's one of the few places where simply being a regular means something.