Here we are in Kaohsiung. It was a hassle to get here as we both had our suitcases as well as a large ikea bag filled with assorted kitchen goods and comforts of life, which nearly broke my shoulder off when I took a turn carrying it. We are staying in a most astonishing Airbnb. It is on a very large and busy road with a bustling night market. The building is from the 60s I think, about 12 stories high, we are on the 8th floor. On the side of the building a massive billboard for the Falun Gong – perhaps they own it? Inside, on the second floor, are two hostess clubs. It is as grimy and rooms-by-the-hour as one might expect, at least in the public spaces. The Airbnb itself, which is what we saw in the photos, is quite different. Small, and like a little Instagram set, it must have been assembled from a kit. Lots of white and pastels, cheery and cartoonish design interspersed with very white Nordic style and natural materials. I say natural – everything is fake. All the plants are fake, of course. The bathroom has fake tiles stuck onto the generic white. There is a shelf of books, with mystifying spines; I checked and they were all fake books seemingly generated by a defective neural net. Even the magazines are fake; they have content inside but it is all fake. Well, at least it’s clean and I’d far rather an Instagram set than the rest of the building. I did check very carefully for cctv cameras.
For a late lunch we went down to the port. A real Morris Mini puttered past – the old kind, not the newer relaunch – and stopped, and a young woman got out to a bubble tea shop. It was hot and we were tired so a bubble tea seemed an excellent idea, we queued up behind her. She helped us navigate the menu and it turned out to be best bubble tea we’ve had in Taiwan, with what seemed to be bubble made in-house, and really delicious tea, not over-sweet at all. Lovely.
At the port we saw a couple of container ships slide past and a battleship moored. On the horizon were lines of ships passing, and I had a brief thought of how other ships might one day be seen on the horizon.
We climbed up steep, pleasant streets to a green hilltop with an old bunker on it, and were surprised to see one of the statues from the art exhibition a week ago, rising from the rooftop of a house and looking over a little temple towards the lighthouse on a cape opposite.
We continued to the British Consul’s house and were struck by the interpretation. The British came on gunboats, following the Opium war, but the presentation here was welcoming – not something you’d find in actual former colonies. The house was perched on a hill and had a path going down to the office, between tall boulders hung over with vines and banyan roots. At the bottom, there was some excellent dioramas – the British officers with gold hair (actual gold), surrounded by natives (and, in one scene showing the cosmopolitanism of Kaohsiung past) a Sikh. One diorama depicted a dentist who was prone to extracting Han brains and so had some difficulty in getting patients, however he was considered a good dentist so did have a loyal clientele.
After a coffee stop we walked on to a park by the train tracks where there were scores of people flying kites and blowing bubbles. Then onwards past the Pier 2 development and a miniature train, men gambling. The GF was by now very hungry so we took a taxi to a night market and had the best oyster omelette I’ve ever had. Worth the wait – after we placed our order and paid, we were told to come back in an hour which, for a dish that takes about 3 minutes to prepare, is really something.