第三十二個星期：Visiting Small Towns and Big Cities

smhanes88
Apr 9, 2017
5 min read

星期一：Today I had class, but after I finished I met my parents by the Love River where we first walked around, ate some good Japanese food, and then rode the little tourist boat down the river, though it turned out that the tour was all in Japanese so it wasn’t super helpful.

(at the Love River)

(old Spanish Cathedral by the river)

(tourist ferry)

(Kaohsiung City bears)

星期二：My parents came to Wenzao for lunch and Mackenzie and I took them out for some noodles. Then after my afternoon class one of my classmates asked me out for some shave ice which was really fun because that's the first classmate from my regular Wenzao clases. that I've hung out with on my own. After class today, I met my parents again for dinner. We went to this cool restaurant that was filled with a bunch of antiques from the Japanese and early KMT eras of Taiwan; they even had an old train car inside. Dinner itself was really good too, though I was a bad interpreter and accidentally ordered us a bowl of duck blood, which while honestly is not terrible, it was very unexpected.

(eating shave ice with my new friend)

(at the cool restaurant)

星期五：Today we had off school since it was field day and only Joey wanted to participate, so Mackenzie and I took my parents to Chengcing Lake, the largest lake in the city that supplies its drinking water but also has a fancy hotel, a vacation home of Chiang Kai-Shek, and some pretty pagodas. We rented some bikes and rode around to see a few of the pagodas. It ended up being pretty hot outside, but the last time I went to the lake it was all rainy so it was a lot more beautiful this time. In the after my parents I got on the bullet train and headed to Taipei where we would be hanging out for a few days. Once in Taipei it was actually really rainy and chilly, but I took my parents on a rainy walk to find a restaurant that was once a family’s home from the Japanese era but has since been turned into a fancy café. We had some nice desserts and then headed back to the hotel.

(Chengcing Lake)

(cool pagoda by the lake)

(on the bullet train)

(at the Japanese restaurant)

(a rainy street market)

星期六：Since it was still cold today, and I only had shorts, I decided to take my parents up to the town of Wulai which is famous for hot springs and for being an aboriginal town of the Atayal people. Once we got there, we walked around the town for a bit, a lot of it was actually under construction from a 2014 typhoon, and then walked up a really beautiful mountainy road to see a cool waterfall. At the waterfall there were some TV travel reporters and they interviewed my dad and me about why we came to Wulai, which was fun. We then walked back into town where we went to a museum about the Atayal people, and then ate some of the street snacks. I had a stick of bamboo that had meat and rice baked inside and some kind of peanut rice cake that was really gooey but good. We then walked down by the river where we stuck our feet in some really hot hot springs. After baking our feet for a bit, we got in a taxi to head back to Taipei. Our taxi driver was actually Atayal and spent the whole ride telling me about life up in the mountains which was really cool.

Once we got back into the city, we took the city out to the zoo where we caught a gondola up to the town of Maokong. The ride was really beautiful as it was during the sunset so you could see the sun setting over Taipei and the surrounding mountains and temples. Once in Maokong it was really cold, so we headed into a tea house for some good food and nice steamy oolong tea, a Taiwan specialty. I ended up being the one to make the tea, which is actually quite a process, but it was fun to try it out. The tea house also had a really great view of Taipei city and night.

(Cherry blossoms in Wulai)

(the hot springs town in the mountains)

(bridge with traditional Atayal eye pattern)

(Wulai waterfall)

(traditional snack of rice cooked in bamboo)

(riding the Maokong Gondola at Sunset)

(Taipei at night)

星期天：Today we had booked a tour to take us out into Nantou county to the town of Pinglin for a tea plantation tour. We first drove up into the beautiful mountains where we stopped at a place called Thousand Island Lake which was named that because the mountaintops make it look like there are thousands of islands in the small lake. We got to walk around and see tea fields and flowers before stopping off to drink some tea and a little tea house on the mountain. We then drove into the town of Pinglin where we visited a tea museum and garden and the saw some birds roosting on the riverside.

After arriving back in Taipei, we first stopped off at a place called Simple Market or Four Four South Village, which was a military dependent’s village that’s now an arts district. The village was created as a temporary housing option for the soldiers that came from the mainland in the 40s and 50s, but when it became obvious they wouldn’t be returning, they ended up just living in the village. It had some little shops, but was mostly meant for taking artsy pictures, which I took plenty of. From there we had lunch and then visited the Sun Yat Sen memorial hall where we saw the changing of the guards and then learned some about the founder of the Republic of China. From there we visited the Chiang Kai Shek memorial hall square where we learned about Taiwan’s first leader who established Taiwan after Japan left but also implemented martial law until the 80s. We also got to see some beautiful cherry blossoms which made me really happy. We then rode the subway up to Shilin where we visited the famous night market. It was so insanely crowded that there were parts where you literally couldn’t move, but it definitely gave my parents the real night market experience.