This morning we hired a car and driver and went to Fo Guang Shan, a large monastery and Buddhist site outside Kaohsiung and home of the world’s largest seated Buddha, as well as (it turned out) a menagerie of animatronic animals including a mooing stegosaurus. The place itself is immense, set on a hillside overlooking […]
Sporting excursion
This evening, we decided to go to a baseball match. Tainan’s own Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions were playing the Fubon Guardians, so we strolled down to the stadium and bought a pair of tickets for the home side. It was a warm evening, relatively few spectators, though the home side gradually filled up as time went […]
Past the inland sea
The western end of Tainan is Anping, which was once a bar of land or sand enclosing wetlands and lagoons. Yesterday we took a taxi there (I fear my resolve to take buses has been broken by the heat), stopping for a terrible lunch. The GF didn’t think it was as bad as I did, […]
Myth and history
Yesterday we went down to the Koxinga shrine and museum, a fascinating place full of history and religion. Koxinga was a half-Japanese half-Chinese Ming loyalist who fought the Manchu and the Dutch and established a short-lived kingdom in Taiwan. Like Dr Sun Yat Sen he seems to be celebrated everywhere (except by the Dutch) and […]
City gods
Yesterday we went first for lunch to perhaps Tainan’s most famous export, the home of slack season noodles, Du Hsiao Yueh. Quite tasty, and they had some very nice fresh bamboo served simply with a bit of mayonnaise. This is in one of the two historic centres of Tainan, about a 10 minute walk from […]
Stinktown
Tainan is, well, not a pleasant smelling city, at least on its larger roads. The stink is varied too: drains, rotting vegetables, mould, vermin, stale food and oil, other forms of filth. I felt a bit ill last night as we went for a post-dinner stroll, our first real exploration of the town. We went […]
Tainan at last
We came to Tainan last night, at last by ourselves for a short while. In the morning I went to collect the GF’s birthday present – I’ve rented a Playstation for a month and bought him The Last of Us II, a game he dearly wanted to play. It was a bit of a hassle: […]
Home style dining
A remarkable success this morning. It was a working day for both of us but first we went to a restaurant we had heard of – not a restaurant but someone’s house where they cook and serve in their living room. We arrived and no one spoke English and the cook came out of the […]
Crab
An excellent lunch today. It was a working day, and we went to famous old seafood place where they specialise in crab. Deepfried with deepfried garlic. Delicious. Some very tasty food here in Kaohsiung. Though crab is undoubtedly a hassle to eat.
Good luck tiger
We took the commuter train out to a suburb which was very KL like, at least like the parts of KL that are dominated by sterile condos and no pedestrians. It was very, very hot. We’d found a rather nice dim sum place, and then went on to the Kaohsiung art museum which proved rather […]