TAINAN, TAIWAN

2016-01-10, 11:50, JASON

STAY: FUQI HOSTEL

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Flagship trip of 2016. After Thorin's family had come and gone for Christmas, we wanted to bring in the new year with my family. Found a budget flight to Kaohsiung via Scoot, a recently opened route, and took the local train to Tainan. This was for two days, and then we would return back down to Kaohsiung to spend the rest of the time with my family.

We arrive to the airport, and we take the Kaohsiung MRT (KMRT) to Tainan. There are these cute "bento boxes", in Chinese they're called bian4 dong1 for the pin-yiners out there, that you would get before going on the train back when Taiwan was developing. Now, the train isn't as 'old school', but they still sell these bento boxes to eat on the train. They're good: rice, with a slab of pork, some veggies, and a hard-boiled egg. So, we happily ate our bentos while traveling to Tainan. The journey took only about 1 hour, passing by rural and developing Taiwan countryside. A different view compared to the usualy city-scape you see in Taipei as well as other financial capitals in Asia.

Upon arriving in Tainan, we walk towards our hostel, FuQi hostel, just about 20 minutes away. We get there and it's this super old-school style hostel with Taiwanese decor and Taiwanese girls running the place. These girls are fierce. They yell and talk over each other, speak their minds, and we like how alive it is. Thorin gets a good chance to practice a bit of his Chinese as he's been learning for a while. Actually, that sums up the entire trip: him getting a chance to practice his Chinese.

After settling in, we decide to go to the old Anping district in Tainan. Since Tainan had been occupied by the Japanese and the Dutch, there's a mix of styles here, and you can see the influence at places that we went such as the Anping Old Fort. Leave it to the westerners to make a fort. The Chinese just built temples, as can be seen by the huge temples scattered generally around the city. Seriously, you'll walk for a bit and there'll just be this extravagant temple down the road, next to a fancy restaurant. So, in Anping, we first went to the Anping Tree House. It sounds a bit silly, but it was actually one of my favorite sites. It was an old house that has been 'grown into' by banyan trees, known for their long whispy roots. It looked dilapidated but I think that was the style: to present an archaic house with trees grown in, and then to subsequently turn it into a museum. They constructed a few walkways around the house as well as down to the river, so it felt like you were in a rustic house one second, and the next along the wetlands near the river. 

After the treehouse, we decided to head towards the Anping old fort (Fort Zeelandia) to take a look. There were some great old school Chinese songs playing, and they were really great to do drag to. The fort itself was pretty cool. Not much to see there, but we just walked around the grounds and took a look at the history of Taiwan. Surrounding the fort, there were some old temples, and we also stopped over to have oyster-omelette (o-ah jian) which was good. Afterwards, we took a look at the sunset just along the Tainan horizon

After Anping, we decided to head back into the Western part of Tainan and go see Chihkan Lou, which was the old administrative building in Tainan built by the Dutch. It's managed to keep a lot of the old-school Chinese architecture to it, but that's probably after Koxinga took it over from the Dutch and rebuilt it. The site itself was worth seeing at night, as most of it was illuminated. In fact, it's probably more impressive at night. Something peaceful about wandering around a temple at night. 

We get back to the hostel after Chihkan lou, picking up some pigs heart soup noodles as well as some curry on the way. The food in this city is phenomenal: just a bunch of small shops along the way each offering delicious crap. When we get back to the hostel, we chat with the people there for a bit. Turns out, one of the girls was an English literature major reading some complete anthology or other from some poet. The heck? Her English comprehension was far superior to ours in terms of poetry. She even thought the translation for 'receding hairline' was 'alopecia', which, if you ask half of my American friends, probably they wouldn't even know that word. That is, unless they're suffering from it :-).

Decided that staying at the hostel was a bit boring, so we went out to Dadong night market to just walk around. Interesting vibe, there were some guys wearing skirts and guys holding hands. Really cool contrast to traditional gender expression, I thought. We ate some stinky tofu as well as some scallion pancake (tsong1 you2 bing3) and just walked around to soak in the vibe. The market was just big enough to wander around for about an hour or so before returning back, with a sense of accomplishment

The next day was mild. We were headed off to Kaohsiung to go see my family, so all we did was walk around the streets of Tainan, and then hit up Lin2 Bai3 Huo4, which was an old department store created by the Japanese during their occupation. Most of it had turned into some sort of hipster, artisinal joint selling little random things you'd never use but are so cute. After climbing to the top, there were some historical bits: various bombing shells dented into the wall during the bombing by the Americans, a shrine, and a small restaurant. The whole place was different compared to other department stores, not your usual chain stores, so it was worth the trip. One of their claims to fame back in the day was that they had a working elevator in the department store, so we rode that down after climbing to the top. Was it anything spectacular? I mean, it was an elevator ride..

Overall, Tainan was great. It had a relaxed, chilled vibe to it (as much of Taiwan does). We took the train back to Kaohsiung, and, of course picked up a little bento box along the way.

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