6 May 2023
Am I staying in the wrong city?
Yilan to Luodong by train for dinner
No really, should I have spent 3 nights in Luodong instead of Yilan? I look at the map of Taiwan a lot and this is my 5th time here and I had never heard of Luodong. It never seems to get mentioned. And yet it seems to be twice as busy as the much more well known Yilan city. I suspect this is another case of province vs city, Yilan is the name of a city and a province, and in theory the city has a higher population, and yet Luodong has all the colourful lights, markets and people.
Not that it matters much of course, and it is possible that I have not yet seen all of Yilan, I have tomorrow night to check if I missed it, but also, Luodong is about a 10 minute train ride away, just as Jaoxi was earlier today. So the moral of this not even a story is, everything is 10 minutes away in Taiwan.
Now to describe Ludong a bit more. It has a night market that shows up on google maps at relatively zoomed out zoom levels, and my inspection this evening declares that this is warranted. It does not have a mega mall, so there is no food court! SHIT, what now? It has a larger train station than Yilan. Just like Yilan, the train station is on the edge of town, there is basically nothing behind it.
Other than that, it is a small Taiwanese city, there are not a lot of footpaths, there are a lot of scooters, and OMG I did not take a photo of an incense burner today! Challenge, failed.
This is the street leading away from Luodong station, but it is about a km away from the centre of town, the streets get busier than this.
Here is the station, it has a couple of restaurants inside it. The Yilan station has a giraffe sticking out of it, so it's a toss up as to which is better. I will take a shot of the giraffe as I leave Yilan in a couple of days time.
!!!!, !!!!!, Why the hell am I not staying in this hotel? That is a little train at the bottom that is also the hotel restaurant.
This is the only thing that can be called a mall in Luodong (I think). It has no food court. Now what?
Now for the obligatory night market shots. Let me see if I am using obligatory correctly, sometimes I make up words, OK, obligatory is the word is was looking for, quite cromulent.
The lions club have provided this excellent, train?
OK, more night market. It seems to go for many busy streets full of people. I actually avoided some of the busier bits.
People live for sitting outside with thousands of people filing past, as they try not to get hot oil poured over them, or stab the back of their throat with a stick that has a squid on it.
No food court, so I found a healthy restaurant, and had fish. And it was actually pretty great. The purple chunk is beetroot (possibly), and the white vegetable at the top right is some kind of translucent over boiled potato derivative. Today was a 40,000+ step day, how many will there be tomorrow? Do not worry though Korea5 trip from last year, my all time monthly step record is not in danger! That is all for now.