A full lap of Taiwan in March 2017 - Page 6

On my morning walk, I was enjoying the fine looking streets of Kaohsiung, and damn it I had to type it again.

This is a huge gentlemens club. Probably quite exclusive, as I dont think Johnny Walker blue label is cheap. The building seems to be made of white marble.

Colorful flowers, so colorful. I prefer the American spelling of color.

More great streets I did not have time to walk down.

Here it is, the tri-force space ship building ready for take off.

The dual department stores of Sogo and Shin Kong Mitsukoshi. I had no time to go in either, but I think Tainan has both brands too, for future food court opportunities of a cheap dinner.

Here comes my train to Tainan. Despite being a slow local train, they have attached a sleek modern locomotive to the front. The carriages were a hybrid of what you might get on a bullet train and a local train. There are toilets even on the local trains.....hello mother.

The Tainan train station is the most basic yet. And there is no signs of an upgrade. I must point out that this is NOT the high speed rail line, thats some distance from my hotel closer to the mountains.
I was quite amused that at some point in the distant past, this many public phones were ever deemed necessary.

A random Tainan street. Yep, still looks like Taiwan. I wonder if the old Japanese and Dutch areas will look different. Yes there is a Dutch area of Tainan.

TRUE JESUS. I prefer the untrue.

I now can declare Donutes to be the best cafe, ever. Fantastic coffee, great service, 3 levels of seating, an excellent bakery on site. Australia needs Donutes.
Fun fact, the Chinese characters for Donutes translate in Pinyin to Duo Na Zi.

Donutes even has a huge library inside it with a ladder you can climb up and fall off. Its high enough to probably kill you if you fell.

Still a bit early, I hung out with some Taiwanese unemployed obese men and played car racing games.

This is just another example of the cafes in Taiwan. I might go here tomorrow if I get sick of Donutes. This one has dried flowers hanging from the roof.

Here is my hotel room. Smaller than the last, but very modern.

The unusual thing about this hotel is the enormous shower. Probably not depicted too well in the photo, but you can fit at least 9 people in the shower. Important if you are having a party in your room, which I am.

Near the old Japanese department store is an actual Jap-a-nees-ee looking shrine.

It is not at all brightly colored and there is no ATM or scrolling LED.

Here is the oldest department store. It is not a huge store, but it is 5 levels high and full of high quality Japanesey looking tourist stuff.

The roof shrine, with steps leading up to a leaping off point. This is where the Japanese occupying forces made their last stand. Those without swords for ritual disembowelment leapt off from here. A bit more history lesson for everyone.

If you climb up and lean out very far and put one leg over the edge whilst balancing your camera with one hand and using an outstretched free arm as a counter balance, you can take this photo of the view.
Worth the risk.

The inside of the store. So ancient.

Tonights random sort of blurry street scene. Actually theres another to come. Mainly because they are colorful.

This was the bank of Japan. Built in the Japanese Roman style.

Another random street scene on my very interesting walk between the old store and the new mall. There were a huge amount of actual restaurants along all these streets. Sit down restaurants with tables AND chairs, where the food is actually cooked in a kitchen rather than in the streets.
Tourist friendly Tainan.

Heres the new mall, and its vast parking lot.

The mall was quiet, it is Monday I guess, but the food court was still awesome. I think I enjoy food courts a little too much. Maybe there is a self help group or website or an app or something. Maybe I should start a kickstarter.

There is also a department store style basement food hall area, despite this place not being a department store to my knowledge.

Heres my amazing dinner. Its a hybrid fusion something. Theres a layer of omelette, with fried rice on top, then some kind of unusual tofu, and then Sichuan red pepper numbing chilli sauce.
As is always the case, I had to go into great detail that I wanted spicy, very spicy, please more spicy. And as often happens, the girl who sold it to me watched intently as I ate it, waiting for me to have some kind of unfortunate chilli related episode.

It was now late, for me, but I still had time to appreciate the carnival of curiosities on the way out. I sat on the pig on the merry go round until security came.

Then I had time to appreciate the bamboo gay rainbow. Taiwan is about to legalise gay marriage, the first place in Asia to do so. They like to remind you of that at every possible opportunity, even though it hasnt happened yet.

This is a giant bowling bowl-a-rama whatever. The photo is here because it has an AMF logo, and I realised I dont know who AMF are, I thought they might even be Australian.
No, they are not, AMF is American Machine and Foundry, and in their heyday, they made not only bowling alley equipment, but nuclear reactors, bicycles, and for a while they even owned Harley-Davidson. So there you go.
I like to educate my readers.

Last pic tonight, this is the largest building in the area. It is a huge Shangri-La hotel joint venture with Far Eastern Shopping Malls, strangely enough called the Far Eastern Shangri-La.
And horror of horror! I saw some white people hanging out front smoking. Hello fellow white people, enjoy your smoking.

On my way to the bus I went down an entire street full of nothing but electronic components shops. Remember Tandy and Dick Smith? Of course you remember Dick Smith still if you are Australian, but when I review this in 10 years time perhaps our memory will be fading.
There are basically no good electronic component shops left in Australia. A shame, cause those 6 cent 100 ohm resistors are a good money maker.

The bus stop has some dodgy looking USB ports and a phone shelf. I left my phone there and will collect it when I return this afternoon.

Here is the Fort Zeelandia. So many windmills and blue colored pottery.

The whole time, I felt like I was being watched. And I was, by multiple drones.

A bit more wall. There was multiple levels of excavations and re built areas showing you the whole history of the place archealogically, if thats your thing.

There is no concept of gender fluidity in Taiwanese schools. Boys wear blue tracksuits, girls wear red.
The transsexual bathroom debate continues to rage on for another week!

It is blossom season. I dont focus enough on blossoms. They are different blossoms to Japan blossoms but blossoms none the less.

The dutch liked to manicure trees whilst defending from Genghis Khan.

There are 2 museums / snack bars on the site. This one has a diorama, actually so does the other one. Nice annoying fluro light reflection.

Todays leafless tree of the day photo! Somewhere around here is a shed with a banyan tree growing through it. The internet says its one of Anpings top attractions, I saw the photo online and decided I didnt need to see it.
I also decided I didnt even need to photograph the oyster shell cement kiln, which literally was just a shed, not even a tree growing through it.

You can climb up the fort tower and enjoy the view. Annoyingly its completely sealed in perspex sheets to ruin photographs and make it hot as hell.

There were just too many temples in this area. So I took a photo of just one.

Probably photo of the day, the interesting looking home to wild dogs, that is also the fishermans graveyard. I wonder if they actually buried people here or just erected stones in memory of people lost at sea?

Future residents of the above graveyard.

This is not the old shopping street in Anping, its a regular street in Anping. It is much nicer than the shopping street in Anping.

Water is running out of the demon swords. Children decided to speak to me here. I chose to try Chinese, they responded, USE ENGLISH SPEAK!

This is the famous ancient preserved shopping street. Really it is, I checked twice. Its just a few stands selling junk between ordinary looking buildings.

A man made canal replaces what used to be the ocean. I had to look a lot on google to figure out where the city proper is. Tainan is huge. The bus ride was over 30 minutes, the actual city is on the horizon.
These tall buildings are a new satellite city.

I remember seeing these very bright orange trees on the bus to the buddha theme park the other day. I couldnt get a good photo out the bus window, so was happy to find another.

Again, this used to be ocean I think, there are big breakwaters on the horizon here and some farming fields. The swampy bits became mangroves, and apparently the black spoon billed something bird sanctuary.

A bit more canal. A map showed a warship parked along here. But there is no ship. False advertising.

And here I am proudly holding my card which I loaded all my spare change onto only to find it did not allow me to buy detergent.
I loaded about $4 Australian onto the card, which was $2 too much. As I left I gave my card to a little old lady who was entering with her washing. She looked at me very very suspiciously as she snatched the card.

Here we have the Dutch surrendering to the Japanese. When the Dutch built the place they must have realised this would eventually happen so they designed a statue in advance.

The outside of the Chicken tower. It is confusing as there are 2 towers, but the grounds are shaped in a way that its impossible to get a good shot of both at the same time.

You can climb up to the upper levels. There are signs that count how many people are upstairs and I think 10 is the maximum. I dont know how they police that effectively when its busy.
Upstairs is rickety wooden floorboards that threaten to give way.

The roof of the other bit. There are ruins behind it of what I presume was the original Dutch design with windmills and clogs and cheese.

The grounds are quite nice, they have installed bright lighting that changes colors periodically so you can appreciate what it might look like green, or pink, or maybe even purple.

Me blocking the view. Super stance - ACTIVATE.
My hair looks like an awesome helmet.

A bit more chicken tower.

Nice tree, theres a waterfall, and a wall with a whole in it and a bridge.
With my super descriptive text you dont even need to look at the pictures.

Behind here, is what actually, genuinely, possibly just may in fact be is an old style street. Its not mentioned on any map. Its mainly cafes, dessert bars and galleries, but a bit fancier than most of Taiwan, the food is prepared inside, and people dont ride their scooters into the shops to collect their bubble tea.

At the end of old street is an absolutely enormous, dark temple. This is just the door, but it goes up a long way into the dark of night. Might warrant a return visit in daylight to see whats going on.

Tainan footpaths are generally ok. Except this scooter repair guy has decided to install his hoists directly in the middle of the footpath. I am standing on the road in the traffic to take this photo.

Apparently this is the market area. And indeed off the streets there are lots of alleyways with roller doors down. I believe its a wholesale clothing market, but must only be open during the days. In case I need to buy some cheap chinese Mao pants that come up to my nipples.
Taiwan was never Mao, but they did embrace the Mao pants.

I wasnt hungry, so I just had ramen. Then out came the biggest serve ever. I ate about half. It was actually pretty good, the store claimed their chef developed his ramen skills on Mount Fuji itself!
Their chef looked a lot like a teenage girl to me.

To get to the Chimei museum, you go to Bao'an station. Which was painless and cheap. The museum is about 600m from the station, it is so huge you cant possibly miss it.

I passed the local swamp.

Not sure if I am still in Taiwan.

There was hardly anyone around when I arrived, that would change, but heres a school group arriving nice and early. I believe school kids get in free.

Then at least 50 tour buses arrived. If you book online you have to select a timeslot. Since I have a foreign passport, no need.
It did become busy inside, but generally you could just go to wherever the school groups werent, they were all doing guided audio tours.

This is the actual front of the building, which is a huge structure, with even larger manicured grounds. There were lots of wedding photos being taken in the grounds, including one woman wearing angel wings made from white balloons.

All the white was blinding, and tough work for my poor long suffering camera.

I made it to the entrance before the tour groups. Despite carrying my passport with me today as the website suggested I need to, they did not ask for it.

Some time later, I had finished looking at everything, including some things twice, and headed to the cafe, where I risked taking a photo. My cake and coffee was delicious, and cheap. Cheaper than it would be at Starbucks or Donutes.
They must have over ordered on the cardboard santa claus cream ornament.

If you are really lazy, you can catch an old fashioned electric buggy back to the station.

The station was quite nice, there is no convenience store in this town, but there are vending machines in the enormous museum car park for water / ion replacement salt drinks. It was damn hot again today!

Now I am back in town and looking for the old street I found last night. I am still quite far from the street, but here is the old street restaurant. It was expensive and looked crap.

Todays busy market street. Death by scooter is a real possibility here.

I found the old street. The buildings genuinely appear old and possibly Japanese.

There are a lot of cat cafes, but they dont open until 3pm, which is strange. Most things in this street dont open until 3pm.

A bit more view.

I was also too early for the hello kitty cafe.

Tainan is a surveillance paradise. Every intersection has cameras like this. One for each lane. I dont know what they are looking at.

This is the future home of the Tainan fine arts museum. It is huge. I dont know what it will eventually look like, but examining the shape of the steel framework, I think it will be ye olde Chinese style.
A small old man in a security guard uniform chased me away.

Now I am at the Confucius temple, and I am being attacked by turtles. There are probably a hundred of them in this green turtle pond.

This mini turtle is king of the turtles, overseeing his fellow turtles.

OK, one more turtle photo.

The previously mentioned, Confucius temple. It was a little confusing to me as there is no buddha.

Instead of praying to buddha, you pull the same move in front of a Confuscius riddle.

Fighter jets. So many fighter jets.

The grounds of the temple area are very nice.

You can also spend time appreciating some confusing Confuscius bonsai.

All that museum and temple excitement and a lack of lunch despite the addition of a morning tea meant I needed an afternoon snack. A balanced snack of fruit, fruit in jelly, and green tea in chocolate.

Part one of the parade. LED truck.

Part 2 of my parade, my chariot. I politely declined.

Part 3 of parade, my gigantour guards.

I walked in the direction of these buildings thinking they were hospitals. Turns out they were flash hotels and a big department store and even an ice skating rink, as you shall see.

Over the road is the blue cultural zone, this is the mascot. It was in this area all the movie making and photo shoots were going on.

I got a good view of the enormous department store from here. I say department store a lot on my various trips.

Here is some art work.

More art work, cat themed of course.

Me, my little blue friend, and a cat. It was all happening.

This woman was earlier appearing with 4 much younger dancers in matching outfits whilst she mimed a song with an elaborate multi camera setup.

Time to head into the big store, 5 basement levels! One of which has Tokyu Hands.

Tonights food court. Its not the same as any of the previous food courts I swear.

Dinner was Coco curry, which they also have in Taiwan, or as some like to call it, little Japan. I had the tofu and eggplant omurice variety.

The upper levels had lots of exhibitions. I believe this one is cakes made by the various bakeries and dessert places in all the basement food halls.

Final photo is from a different store, this one under a hotel is 3 basement levels of youth shops, but also about 10 great restaurants including one I wish I went to instead of Coco curry specialising in Sichuan food.
Which reminds me the upper levels of the other store had an awesom Hunan style restaurant called 1010. Which warrants further investigation.
But I digress, 3 levels underground is an ice skating rink.