Night market draws crowd, sells sausages

More than 2,000 people attended the annual Taiwanese Night Market at the HUB Saturday to participate in the games, festivities and food offered by the UW Taiwanese Student Association (TSA).

“Saturday went excellently and a lot of people came,” said James Tse, TSA’s internal vice president. “We ordered twice as much food as last year but managed to sell out over a couple of hours.”

Night markets are a pretty common event in Taiwan, said Kevin Hu, TSA’s treasurer.

“It’s a lifestyle in Taiwan to go out and be on a strip of street with games and food,” Hu said.

Ten booths were set up to sell the food, including TSA’s best selling item: sausages.

“It’s a very popular item in Taiwanese markets,” Hu said. “We started selling them two years ago and they are the best selling things we have.” The sausages were so popular that the club had to organize two booths to cut down on long lines.

This year, six restaurant vendors participated in the market, including local restaurants Mee Sum Pastry, Oasis, Jack’s Tapas Café and Tapioca Express.

“They offer food that is more traditional to Taiwan that not a lot of restaurants have around here,” Hu said. “A lot of food that we have at the night market is not that easy to find at any Asian restaurant.”

Along with traditional Taiwanese food, the night market also had games and entertainment. Four different live performances by UW students kept the market’s visitors entertained as they waited for their food. Brothers of the Lambda Phi Epsilon fraternity performed a step show routine, the Japanese Student Association jazz and ska band, JaSka, performed their live routine and two guitar performances kept the night active with music.

“The games went well and the performances were amazing,” Tse said.

Three different booths were set up for fun and games. Winners in the ring toss, celebrity balloon toss and king of cans games were rewarded with free traditional Taiwanese food.

“Our main focus is to bring the Taiwanese culture to the UW,” Tse said.

Organizing such a large event took extensive planning.

“We started planning back in January,” Tse said. “We had to find all the vendors and get funding. The market is pretty expensive, but we break even usually.”

TSA divides into subgroups in order to accomplish the many tasks to host the event. The group created a specific Web site for the event to help get the word out and placed flyers in certain areas of the community.