Taiwan

We Almost Didn't Make It Into Taiwan

It's embarrassing the frequency at which we are writing posts with this title.  Taiwan will be our last stop on this leg before heading back to the US.  Avid readers will know that we use miles and points to book business class flights for flights longer than 6 hours or overnights.  Right now, due to capacity issues with Chinese airlines and restrictions on flying over Russian airspace, paid tickets are pretty expensive besides.  Current flights more than a week out in business class are going for 200,000 miles or more per person.  United, though, is regularly making business class award space at the saver level available on their flight from Taipei to San Francisco just 3 to 5 days before departure.  Once saver level is available on United, you can book through a partner program as well.  We could book saver level using just 63,000 points by transferring our Chase points to Air Canada and booking the ticket that way.  Air Canada is usually 75,000 points from Asia to North America but there is a 20% transfer bonus currently from Chase to Air Canada.  United would charge 100,000 miles at their saver level.  Since we didn't want to pay 200,000 miles each for a ticket, we figured we'd just wait until a few days before we're supposed to leave to see if they make saver level seats available for the day we want to travel.  After all, that 200,000 mile price would be valid for last seat availability anyway.

Taiwan doesn't require a visa for US Citizens for stays under 30 days, so we did our online arrival card and thought we were all good.  For the section on the online arrival card marked "anticipated departure date" and "anticipated departure flight," we filled in the flight we were hoping to get on. We arrived at Changi Airport in Singapore, visited the Jewel (check out our Singapore page), and then went to check in for our flight.  We got up to the counter and they asked us about our flight out of Taiwan.  They said that Taiwanese authorities require proof of onward travel for entry.  OOPS!  They brought over the supervisor and he reiterated what the agent said.  

We told about our plan and asked them what we should do at this point.  After a conversation with the supervisor,  they entered the information in the computer which we had put on our arrival card and let us check in.  As we were waiting in the lounge, though, Eli thought better of the situation and suggested we maybe should actually book something in case we got asked to show proof at passport control in Taiwan.  Since miles are redepositable without a fee and you can cancel a flight for a full refund within 24 hours regardless, we decided it would be a prudent thing to do.  We booked economy flights for ourselves using Eli's last bit of United miles on the flight we had told the agent at the counter we would take (and the one we put on our entry card).  After we cleared passport control in Taiwan we'd just cancel the ticket.

And of course, as we passed through passport control, they didn't ask us about our onward travel at all.  As we got into the cab on our way to our flat in Taipei, Eli canceled the tickets and we'll keep an eye out for our business class saver seats.

Someone Told Us That Taiwan is a Mix of China and Japan

And we sort of get it, too.  Sanrio, meaning Hello Kitty, is a big thing here, perhaps bigger even than in Japan.  Eva Air has a Hello Kitty plane that travels around the world with Hello Kitty theming.  The product competitions and the love of anime that we witnessed on our first day in Taiwan also seem to make the comparison apt.  The Taiwanese are also fond of cuteness and cartooniness in other ways as well.  The "ding" as we walked through the MRT turnstile in Taichung was actually a tweet, like a real bird song that was recorded and played back to confirm your fare was deducted.  A random bus in Taipei broke out into "It's a Small World" when you pressed the stop call button.  All kinds of different classical music played as the train alert arrival chimes.  All kinds of products here are hawked with cartoon characters.  We've included some of our favorite ones we've seen so far below.

A Perfect Day in Taipei: Traditional Breakfasts, Cultural Spots, and Local Cuisine for Dinner 

Breakfast is a thing in Taiwan, so we ventured out first thing to get one of the most popular breakfasts at Fu Hang Soy Milk.  It's on the second floor of a food court and the line on a weekend goes all the way down the staircase and around the corner of the block.  We got the salty soy milk but you can also get sweet; it's served hot and is like a thicker miso soup.  You can order it with donuts that you dip in the soy milk.  They also have breakfast sandwiches with crepe-like wraps or with thicker bread and all kinds of fillings.  You can even order donuts as a filling on these also.  Knowing we never like to miss out, we each had a sandwich that included a donut and we shared the soy milk.  We liked the soy milk and dipping the donuts in that, but we felt like the sandwiches with the donuts were just too much grease and bread to be enjoyable.

It was a short MRT (metro) ride from our flat to the restaurant.  We got scolded by an older woman on the platform who indicated we were waiting to board in the wrong location.  We had been standing to the side of the platform door waiting to allow for passengers on the train to get off.  Apparently, though, in Taiwan, you must wait only to one side of the platform door and not the other.  Noted and we will correct ourselves for the next time.

The soy milk restaurant is right near 1914 Creative Park, so we went there next.  Taipei has a bunch of creative parks around town.  They are mostly repurposed industrial buildings that support incubating micro-retail, arts, and technology.  Just outside the buildings there was a commercial promotion going on for some sort of rice chip.  There were lines and lines of people waiting for their chance to don the helmets and compete to win some sort of prize (which we think is a big box of the crisps).  As we continued walking, we actually saw another platform doing some sort of promotion for Lay's potato chips, but we didn't stop there.

We were hoping to get some atmospheric shots with old industrial elements, or smokestacks or something, but the buildings were fairly nondescript.  It was cool, though, to see some of the micro-retail items on sale.  Eli was particularly interested in a reusable drink sling made up of recycled materials.  In most of Asia, people carry their drinks in a small plastic bad that has handles so that they don't have to hold on to the cup directly.   We've seen these plastic slings with drinks hanging from the handlebars of bikes and scooters.  It's good that they're thinking about reducing waste with that product.  The other interesting venue was a pop-up store selling Honey Sweetie merchandise.  You can see from the picture that it's kind of anime "page 6" style stuff and just this side of anime Playboy.  Needless to say there were no women in the store that weren't there working.  People have mentioned that Taiwan is a cross between China and Japan, and we can see that a bit.

We headed next to The Treasure Hill Artist Village which was once a squatter camp back in the 1940's but is now an artist colony.  There are actually some elderly residents from that period who were original residents of the squatter camp and have decided to stay.  We were there on a Sunday, so maybe many of the studios were closed for that reason, but many of them when you looked through the window seemed empty.  It was very atmospheric, though, and the few studios that were open were pretty cool to see.  And there was some mural art and installations around the outside of the studio huts.

From the Artist Village, we walked to the Museum of Drinking Water.  It had just started to rain at this point and so we quickly ran into the building, ignoring all the kids playing in the fountain and pool.  The museum is housed in a water park, or rather, the water park was built around the museum and water treatment plant (which means you have to pay entry to the water park just to go to the museum).  The museum is really just the old pumping station with a bunch of mechanicals from the 1950's and earlier.  We were kind of disappointed.

The rain in Taipei is like Florida in the summer.  Storms start here anywhere between 1:30 an 3pm and are done by dinner time.  We'll have to keep that in mind as we make plans going forward.  At least it cools everything down.  We're having feels-like temps above 100F right now during the day.

For dinner, we headed to Chi Chia Chuang, a bib gourmand.  We loved the crispy chicken roll and the sauteed sweet potato greens in addition to our main, a pot of 3 cups chicken.  We also loved how many of the dishes were served casserole style in dishes the looked like our parents' Corningware.  There was even a chicken and mushroom dish and we joked that it was just like home in Minnesota and Missouri.

A Monday in Taipei: More Foodie Delights, Taipei 101, and Earthquake Surprises

Since basically all museums in Taipei are closed on Monday, and even some things that are government buildings that are just museum-like (like the Chiang Kai Shek memorial), we thought we would do some outdoorsy stuff around the city and then come back and go up the Taipei 101 tower in the afternoon to stay away from the daily afternoon rains.

 We started with breakfast again at a breakfast sandwich shop near our flat.  This was much more up Stephen's alley and he could do this every day.

We're headed to Mao Kong hill.  You can ride up the hill on a gondola style cable car and then there are some hiking trails up top and an old temple to see.  It took us about 45 minutes on the MRT to get there, we walk the 10 minutes from the MRT to the gondola launch point only to find that today started the 3-week period of closure for annual maintenance.  UGH!  So we just headed back to Taipei 101.

Taipei 101 held the record for the tallest building for a while.   The cool thing about it was that you could go into the core of the building and see the wind damper.  Taipei 101 isn't the only building to use a damper, but it's the only one where you can actually see it.  They also show actual video of how it has worked in both typhoons and earthquakes to reduce building sway.  The views were great, but this was cooler.

For dinner we headed to a bib gourmand noodle joint that does hand pulled noodles and dumplings.  The beef soup broth and hand pulled noodles is what they are known for, and they didn't disappoint.  We also stopped at a bib gourmand donut shop and got their best seller basic donut with powdered sugar.  It was much more like a funnel cake than a US donut... much more gooey inside.

It was also a good thing that we got the lesson about the damper during an earthquake earlier today as we felt a little shaking lying in the bed tonight as we were going to sleep.  Stephen thought that it was Eli just bouncing his leg because the shaking wasn't very noticeable, but it was an actual earthquake.... a 5.1 about midway down the east coast of the island.

Taipei's Historical and Cultural Highlights: A Day of Exploration and Reflection

Since many sights were closed yesterday, we decided to hit them all today, again focusing out outdoor stuff in the morning and then indoor stuff in the afternoon.  Breakfast this morning was at a soup stall.  It was just okay.

We started at the Chiang Kai Shek memorial.  While we get there are reasons to have big open plazas in front of monuments for government events and such, we were baking by the time we got from the gate to the memorial (stopping to take photos of the national theater and concert hall, too).

From there we headed to Peace Park 228 which commemorates a massacre by the government of Taiwan against civilians during the post-WWII upheaval and before the arrival of the KMT.  There is an actual museum in the park that talks more about the massacre and that period of history, but it was temporarily closed.  This park had a lot more shade than the park at the CKS memorial... very much welcomed and appreciated.

Our final stop was the Palace Museum which contains Chinese artifacts that were taken with the feeling KMT government as they left mainland China.  It was mostly bronzes, jade, ceramics, and porcelains but it was pretty vast.  They seem to do frequent stagings of different exhibit themes with their collections.  Some of the ones we saw worked and other ones not so much.  They also had some interactive technology exhibits with the collection... again, some were more effective than others.  As we were walking around the museum, though, we contemplated what a strange identity it must be to be Taiwanese at this point.  You're at once Chinese but yet not, but culturally and historically your identity seems (at least to us) very Chinese still.  There's the fine line of ambiguity that the government here has to walk as well.  We tried making comparisons to what it might have been like to be an American 75 years after the revolution, but (at least at this point now) we couldn't have imagined any American in New York going to see a museum of British artifacts and thinking about their cultural history.  Maybe it's more like America 100 years after the founding of Plymouth and Jamestown.  Maybe there's more to this analogy that meets the eye (but hoping that it doesn't eventually end up in a war of secession).

Dinner was at a just so-so vegetarian restaurant.  The tater tots with truffle butter, though, were awesome.

From Taichung's Art Scene to the Serenity of Sun Moon Lake: Our Getaway from Taipei

We're doing an away trip over the next two days to Taichung and Sun Moon Lake.  We had wanted to go to Takoro Gorge as our trip into the countryside, but it's been closed since the April earthquake.  We also got stymied trying to plan to go to Alishan National Park via the mini-railway as an overnight trip from Tainan in the South as that was damaged in the earthquake as well.  

Taichung is 50 minutes on the high speed rail and is known as an industrial city.  Many Taiwanese now live in Taichung and commute daily to Taipei to save on housing costs.  While we enjoyed our visit to the few sights that we went to see, we wouldn't recommend necessarily that anyone go.  Our favorite stops were the Taiwan Fine Arts Museum, which had a lot of calligraphy and ink paintings from the Ming and Qing periods and was solely focused on art created on the island of Taiwan.  We actually got really good at identifying the different styles of scripts used in the scrolls on display.  We wondered, though, with the most loose cursive scripts if even contemporary Taiwanese could identify what it was saying.  They looked more like suggestions of characters that actually something meant to be read. 

We also stopped by the Rainbow village.  It's not easy to get to from the downtown area, but there was a direct bus from the high speed rail station to there, so we started our visit to Taichung there.  The story behind Rainbow Village is that it was a military retiree village where ex-KMT soldiers were given housing after their service.  An ex-army soldier painted his house and the houses around him in 2008 to save the block from being razed for an apartment building, even after all the other retirees in the village had moved on.  In fact, he was still alive and would sit outside his house door until he passed away in January of 2024.  Sadly, it's unclear what they may do with the housing block now, but because of its history, they may let it stand.  Recently, though, many of the murals that he created were painted over with designs done by local school children (the result of a long simmering dispute between the organization that managed the site after it became popular and the government).  The new designs still honor his legacy, but a little of the history is now gone.

For lunch we stopped at an Indigenous barbecue restaurant.  Although a bit pricy, it was well worth it.  We had pork and chicken and both were really good.  

Then we headed off to Sun Moon Lake.  Sun Moon Lake is the largest body of fresh water in Taiwan.  It gets its name from the shape which you can kind of see if you hike up one of the foothills nearby (and there is a gondola too).  It's an easy weekend getaway for city residents.  It's about 3.5 hours from Taipei and between 1 and 1.5 hours from Taichung.  We combined our visit to the lake with our day trip to Taichung and spent the night in Sun Moon Lake.  You can find organized day trips from Taipei on Viator, etc, but we wanted to be more flexible with our time and see how things went.  We rented a car from an agency at the Taichung HSR station. There were no American branded outstations in Taichung to rent online and we couldn't find anything on Rentalcars.com and the like. We're not sure this is true of all car rentals in Taiwan, but it was a bit of a rigamarole getting the reservation. Foreigners need to make contact at least three days ahead of time as they need to put a quote together via email and they don't speak great English.  Luckily google translate works automatically in email.  We needed to show our paper international driver's license; the plastic card was not sufficient.  In the end, though, it was nice to have the freedom to do what we wanted to do that the car provided.  

The area around the lake is known as the homeland of the Thao, one of the aboriginal tribes of Taiwan.  At dinner at the lake we had a really good traditional Thao dish of fern salad (which was dressed with a miso and sesame dressing which we imagine was a bit less traditional).  We stayed at a local hotel with a water view for about $75.  It's a family run spot and nobody there really speaks English, but the host had a se of cards in English that she had had prepared that explained all the important information about parking, breakfast, checkout, etc.  It started raining as we arrived (a bit later than it had been raining in Taipei), and so we got settled and rested a bit.  The rain stopped about 6pm and we walked around the lake for a bit before heading to dinner.  They have a boardwalk/bike path that runs all around the lake and is mostly just over the edge of the lake on pylons, so hypothetically you could walk or bike around the whole thing.

There are also a number of short hikes you can do up into the hills.  The next morning, after breakfast, we headed up Moalan hill on a 1.5 mile hike that had some pretty good grade to it.  The views on the way up were nice, but even from there we couldn't quite get the shape of the lake.  After completing our hike, we drove around the lake for a while.  There are a bunch of temples and pagodas scattered around the lake.  We went to Wenwu temple and got some nice shots.  Stephen climbed up the hill to see the Xi'en Pagoda.  From there you could get a nice view of the shape of the lake.  We drove around the lake a bit more and then headed back toward Taichung to catch the high speed rail back to Taipei.

On our way out to Sun Moon Lake, we stopped at the Earthquake Museum.  It's built on and around the site of a school that straddled the fault  line and that collapsed in the earthquake of 1988.  It was quite impactful to see the building collapsed as it was and the rupture of the earth that raised the track 6 feet up on one side of the fault from the other.  We wondered how they could have kept the structure as it was and still made sure it was safe.  As we left, we saw a group of firefighters with a dog in tow.  They headed over to the ruins and had the dog run though its paces in and out of the rubble... it was a rescue dog.

Once we got back into town, we went out for hot pot for dinner.

The LGBTQ Scene in Taipei

We've been getting better at choosing breakfast restaurants.  After breakfast, Eli went back to the flat to do some stuff related to a possible job opportunity and Stephen headed to see the Ama museum.  Ama (if you've seen Crazy Rich Asians) is the Chinese term of endearment and respect for an older woman.  The museum, though, focuses more specifically on the histories of women who were brought to Taiwan and Taiwanese women who were taken to other countries occupied by Japan as "comfort women" in the lead up to and during WWII.  There were descriptions in English and Chinese, but many of the artifacts were, obviously, in Chinese.  They had a lot of audio testimony but it was in Chinese, so he missed out on being able to appreciate it as much as he could have.  It was worth the visit, though, to be able to learn more about this time in history.  There was also a perfunctory link to the current LGBTQ struggle discussing the challenges comfort women had in fitting into traditional female roles in Taiwanese society after their return and how broadening our idea of family structures is important for these women as well as for LGBTQ people.

On his way back to the flat, he stopped by a couple of Taoist and Confucian temples.  He doesn't have great skills at identifying how architectural styles differ across time and location.  It's not in the same way that he can tell the difference between and appreciate gothic, Romanesque, baroque architecture in European churches.  At a certain point, the sort of start looking alike.

For dinner, we headed out to a really bad Italian restaurant, but then headed just across the street from our flat to the Red House, the area with a bunch of outdoor patio gay bars.  The scene was lively, friendly, and relaxed, although the hosts definitely do some touting to get you to sit at their place.  There are probably 6-7 on the main floor and then a bunch of smaller (almost closet sized) bars on the 2nd floor of the buildings surrounding the patio areas.  At around 11:30 we headed to Locker Room for the drag and go-go boy show.  Cover was about $25 but it includes two STRONG cocktails.  The "locker room" theme is cute.  The venue is tiny and this is about the closest we've been to the drag queens and go-go boys.  We had a great time at the show.  Each country where we've been to a show, the style is a little bit different.  Taiwan's scene is now on the map because this year's Drag Race winner in the US is from Taiwan.  She was just crowned in April.  If Stephen ever wanted to go back to get a PhD (which will never happen....he tried once and decided it wasn't really for him) he would want to do something about cross-cultural variations in performance of drag around the world (but that's probably already been done).

The go-go boys show was probably the most sexy and fun and cute and relatable all at the same time.  We don't think we've ever seen go-go boys smile so much while dancing.  It was definitely a different energy and we appreciated it.  They also invited a number of audience members up to get grinded (ground?) and splashed with the shower; from their reactions it would appear that the water was pretty cold.  Overall a very fun night.

Savoring Taiwanese Delights: Dumplings, Scallion Pancakes, and Night Market Treats

After a late night the previous night, we laid low and chilled.  Breakfast again was even better today.  We had dumplings and scallion pancake "egg McMuffins."  We could do this one every day.

For dinner, we headed to the Huaxi Street Night Market in our neighborhood, stopping at Lungshan temple on the way.  

The temple had a service going on when we arrived, which we had not yet seen.  There were lots of worshipers with prayer books around the temple, and so we worked at being respectful while trying to get some photos.

There were a couple of bib gourmand restaurants that Eli wanted to try in the market.  One was for pork rice and the other for pork bao buns.  They're in the night market, but the stalls close at 8pm, so we went early.  Both places had lines, but they moved quickly.  At the pork rice place we got an extra serving of whole pork belly to go along with the pork rice and we glad we did. While the standard rice had lots of flavor, the pork bits in there were mostly fat.  While pork belly is mostly fat also, the meaty parts were a helpful addition to the rice.  The sauteed cabbage was also helpful in cutting down some of the richness of the pork rice.

The pork belly bao bun benefitted from pickled vegetable that they put on the bun to cut some of the richness of the pork belly.  The bun was very pillowy also.

A Day in Beitou: Thermal Springs, Museums, and a Culinary Farewell to Taipei at Din Tai Fung

Beitou is a short MRT ride outside the downtown area of Taipei.  It took us about 40 minutes to get there.  It developed during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, which started in 1895.  The local indigenous tribes of the area didn't think much of the hot springs, but the Japanese with their hot spring bathing culture were more interested in developing the area.  The Hot Springs Museum is housed in the main public bath house from 1913.

On our way there, we stopped in to the Ketalagan Culture Center.  The Ketalagan are the primary indigenous population in the area.  Indigenous Taiwanese are related culturally and linguistically to populations in Madagascar, the Philippines, Indonesia/Malaysia, and Polynesia including Hawaii and Easter Island.  It is currently hypothesized that the indigenous Taiwan cultures sent waves of travelers out starting around 2000 BCE using their superior boat building and navigating skills.  They navigated to all these far out islands, sometimes populating them for the first time, sometimes integrating with the local population, sometimes subsuming them, and sometimes existing contemporaneously. They continued island hopping, reaching the last of their destinations:  Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island, between 1000 and 1200 CE.

The Chinese began to settle and occupy Taiwan in the 17th century and there were many waves of Chinese migration to the island to the point where they outnumbered the local population.  At the drag show the previous night, in the banter between two of the queens, one of them remarked in a positive way about the other's indigenous heritage eliciting a cheer from the crowd.  The museum wasn't big; it basically just had two galleries.  One had examples of different cultural dress and the other was information about fishing culture and techniques.

We walked along the park the runs on both sides of the thermal creek for a while, past the new public bath house.  We decided, given the ambient temperatures of 90 F, that we would forgo bathing in the sulfur water.  1) we didn't think it would be fun to raise our temperature even more, 2) we didn't want to worry about smelling like sulfur, even if we showered again after exiting the baths.  Every so often, depending on how the wind blew, we would catch a strong whiff of sulfuric gas.  We headed to the source of the spring about 10 minutes from the bath; they need that distance to cool the water a bit.  Even with the ambient temperature around 90 F, the spring was steaming due to the differential between the water temperature and the air temp.  They said the water is as hot as 90 C coming out of the source (which is about 190 F).  That's hot!

We walked up a very long windy uphill road to get to the Beitou Museum.  It is a restored bath house from the 1920s in the Japanese traditional style, but it wasn't really worth it.  There was a small spa next door that had similar traditional Japanese architecture and had some very nice gardens.  You could arrange for a soak in a private tub, or pay about 7 dollars and enjoy the gardens and soak your feet in a few small pools.

For our last dinner in Taipei, we decided to head to the famous Din Tai Fung, a Taiwanese staple.  Din Tai Fung (DTF) is known for their xiao long bao, which are dumplings that have meat and broth in them so when you bite into them you get a squirt of unctuous broth in addition to the meat.  They're actually Shanghainese in origin, but Din Tai Fung have made them famous.  We've been to DTF a couple of times already, once in Shanghai and once in Seattle.  We figured we'd go to the one at the source.  There are about 8 different outlets in the city.  They don't take reservations, but you can check the queue time online.  We found the branch in the city with the shortest queue time and we headed there.  On the way, though, as we were monitoring, that restaurant's time suddenly shot up, so we reassessed and backtracked a bit on the MRT to go to another location whose wait time was less.  It felt very much like we were at a Disney park trying to maximize our visit.

Or wait was going to be about 60 minutes, so we shuffled off to a nearby craft beer bar.  We had a great peach wisse beer that was on happy hour.  It's a bit sweet, a bit sour, and perfect for a hot early evening.  Right on time, our number got called (you can check it through the website) and we were in.  We tried some new dumplings we hadn't had before in addition to our tried and true.  The truffle xiao long bao were exceptional.  You have to order them by the piece, but they were so worth it.  The lamb dumplings were also really good.  We, of course, had the traditional xiao long bao and our favorite dessert, the chocolate xiao long bao.  A fitting end to our time in Taipei.  Tomorrow we're off to Tainan and south Taiwan for the rest of our visit.

Art, Culture, and History in Tainan

We traveled via high speed rail about an hour and a half from Taipei to Tainan, the former capital of Taiwan up until the Japanese moved the capital to Taipei.  We're staying in a great Airbnb with lots of local character, including tatami mats in the living room.  Tainan has lots of little historic alleyways and our house is on one... no more than wide enough for a scooter to pass by.  It definitely provides shade and needed protection from the rain due to its narrowness.

Tainan is only the 5th largest city in Taiwan, and so there isn't really as much public transportation infrastructure here.  That means we're hoofing it a lot in 97 F heat.  UGH!  That also means we're back to seeing lots of scooters and lots of parking on the sidewalk.... another UGH!  Coolest thing we've seen, though, are full-sized electric scooters that have change-out batteries.  We've seen people all over the city at parking lots swapping out the batteries in their scooter for a new one and then jetting off again.  We wondered how far one battery would take them.

There is a military base not far from the center of town, and so every hour or so we would hear military jets flying by at low altitude.  At one point Eli saw them flying in formation and the peeling off like acrobatic flyers.

Tainan has a ton of temples and a lot of museums, so that's mostly what we're seeing here.   Museum-wise, we stopped in at the Tainan Art Museum, which is a contemporary art museum spread across two campuses.  We also stopped in at the Firefighter museum for Kale, Eli's brother who was a firefighter and creates custom leather firefighting uniform items, and the Judicial museum that was right nearby.  Since it's summer break, there were lots of kids in summer camp groups at the different museums.  We loved to watch the ama (older women) docents and their energetic presentations that captured the attention of the young visitors.

Temple-wise we stopped anytime we saw one on the street, which was practically every other block, just to check it out (sometimes photo-worthy and sometimes not), but then we made a point of going to the Grand Mazu Temple, the Koxinga shrine, which was the first Confucian temple built in Taiwan in the late 17th century, and the Chikan tower, which was a temple built on the remnants of the Dutch fort after the Qing dynasty pushed out the Dutch East India Company.  The Koxinga shrine was also like a museum in that the side temples had been converted to provide information about the rituals for honoring Confucius on the various holidays.  We went gaga over the displays and information on the musical instruments.

Like the other cities we've visited in Taiwan, there are also a bunch of "creative spaces" that are repurposed industrial buildings for micro-retail.  We also stopped in to the Hayashi Department Store, which is an art-deco style historic department store in the city center.

Foodie Adventures in Tainan

 We started out on our arrival day with a dinner at Han-Jia Pairing Dinner.  They serve a mostly Western menu but with signature cocktails inspired by movies.  The food was solid, but the cocktails were superb.  Eli's "Mission Impossible" even came with an actual mission with the threat of self-destruction (see photo below).

On the more traditional side, we had good meals at Du Hsiao Yueh and at Zhuxinju (the name only appears in Chinese characters on Google Maps.  Zhuxinju is a set-menu 7 course family style meal; you don't know what you're getting until you show up.  It's traditional home cooking at its best, and we had a fabulous meal with a special shout-out to the milkfish, which was so mild yet flavorful that even Stephen liked it.

Japanese food is easy to find in Tainan.  We had a nice casual meal at an Izakaya (Japanese Pub) near our Airbnb.  On more of the "who knew" side of the coin, we found Turkish and Cuban restaurants in Tainan.  Little Cuba, where we had mojo pulled pork sandwiches, has a fabulous backstory of love at first sight and impenetrable immigration bureaucracy.  

We also had a bunch of good Taiwanese style breakfasts, including crispy gooey rice cakes in hot and sour soup-style sauce.  In Tainan we got to try a whole bunch more different flavored coffees.  Coffee is a thing here in Taiwan.  One of the things we've especially appreciated is all of the fruit infused coffees we've had.  Eli said it makes sense, even more so than tea, since coffee is a really a fruit as well.  We've had osmanthus flavored coffee (osmanthus is a peach scented flower), lemon flavored coffee, pineapple coffee, fig  coffee....and the list goes on.  The pictures don't do much to show you the variation, but trust us that it's  a must-try.

Day trip to Kaohsiung

Kaohsiung in the large port city in the South.  It has a reputation of being gritty, but we loved it and wished we could have spent another day around here.  They've done a lot of redevelopment in the port area, and far more than many of the creative parks in other cities, the one here at the port area lived up to what this could be.  Unfortunately, while Google says that the park opens at 10am, most venues didn't open until 11.  This limited our ability to check out a lot of the spaces (and this part is set over two different groups of warehouses) and still see other parts of the city.  Because they city has been redeveloping, they have lots of great and interesting contemporary architecture as well, which was great to photograph.

There's a park area around Lotus Pond (which is more like a large city lake than a pond).  They've built a few overwater outrageously decorated temples and pagodas that you can walk through/worship? at.  Really they feel more amusement park than contemplative.

On our way back to the rail station to get back to Tainan, Eli ran into a problem with his transit card.  It took visiting 3 info booths across 3 different stations to get it worked out, but finally all was well.  We grabbed a photo of the "dome of light" that's the art feature in the transfer station between red and orange lines on the MRT system here.

Beating the Heat with an Overnight Trip to Alishan National Forest

We had been trying to get tickets for the Alishan Historic Railway for the longest time.  The railway snakes up the mountain range from Chaiyi all the way to Alishan National Forest.  They only put tickets up for sale 14 days before the travel date and they usually sell out very quickly.  On top of that, they just last week opened the railway back up all the way to Alishan station.  It had been truncated for a while due to earthquake damage.  We had seen tickets for the day we wanted to go, but we dilly-dallied in trying to secure them, figuring out all the other necessary logistics to get to Chaiyi to pick up the train, and the tickets disappeared.  We had resigned to not going, but since we felt like we had seen all there was to see in Tainan, we decided we'd rent a car and drive the 2.75 hours to the park, stay overnight, and return the next day.

The park is at 6500 feet and often is shrouded in mist, so it was a welcome antidote to the heat we had been experiencing at sea level.  The drive was without incident, and we arrived at the park and our hotel around noon.  We had a quick 7-Eleven lunch and then hopped on the shortline train for a 10 minute ride further up the hill from the base station.  You can walk up, but we were feeling lazy and wanted to see the good parts before it started to rain.  Unfortunately, we only had about 15 minutes at the top before it started to rain, first lightly and then pretty heavily.  We were prepared with our rain jackets and umbrellas, but eventually, even our waterproof hiking boots were wet on the tongue and ankle padding.

Even in the rain, though, it was beautiful.  The trees are mostly Formosan Cypress, which sort of look like redwood trees.  The whole experience felt very Muir Woods in Marin County north of San Francisco.

The next morning, it was sunny out, so we took a shuttle bus up to a different location (where you can go to see the sunrise, but we went way after sunrise) and then walked down from there.  The photos in the woods, though, didn't come out that different given the amount of canopy.

For our dinner, we went to the best rated restaurant in the park area (they are notoriously generally bad and overpriced).  We had to wait about 30 minutes (in the rain) but we had a great local hotpot variation and some well cooked sauteed wild boar.