Chin-men Travel Guide

This shop is welcomed by the local Kinmenese. Their flavour is more traditional while still taste good. Unlike some of not-so-nice company, their peanut-made candy is soft and not sticky. You can enjoy the feeling of something melting in your mouth. The pack I was holding on my hand is green tea, their newest flavour; to be honest, I don't like green tea as a candiment, but their greentea candy is perfect, I bought many packs last time when I went home. Their other hits are Rou-song(pork), zhu-jiao(pork hoop, it looks like pork hoop not made from pork hoop), and ginger flavoured.

What to buy: They sell not only candy but also wine, noodles, beef jerky and other local dishes. In my opinion, just buy candy in a candy shop since they are good at it. If you are lazy shopping around, then basically you can buy anything local here. They also provide home-dilevery between Taiwan and Kinmen, you can pay when stuffs reach home.

What to pay: Credit card, and cashes.

Due to the reason that it was our frontier, there were many casualties from late 1950s to 1960s. The most famous battle between Kinmen and Xiamen is 23rd August 1958. I've heard a lot about this kind of stories before I was recruited, and if you ever have a chance to visit here during the Ghost Month (Lunar July), PLEASE don't go certain places where the battle took place. A lot of Kinmenese has warned me about this also. My personal experience? Luckily I didn't encounter anything unexplainable, but I did feel bizarre quite a few times when I worked overtime in a tunnel. Well, it is my opinion to respect "them" instead of ignoring everything.

Since Sundays are holidays for soldiers in Kinmen, everything become more expensive than it should be on Sundays. iN kinmen, local shop owners saperate prices into three different parts: local, tourists and soldiers. Needless to say, those for soldiers are very uncheap, especially Internet Cafe.
Make sure you DON'T go such places on Sundays...

Favorite thing: To my great surprise, I saw some very old-time things in Kingcheng (Jincheng), like you can use a coke can to swap caramal cookies with a street vendor. I really could not believe that, because I read such "trade" on book describing early 20th century. Or you can see a herbalist shop established in 189X, every shelf in shop looks very ancient. (Yah, you can see this in Taipei but much more commercialised)