So we took off on a Friday morning from Taipei to Taiwan's second largest town, Kaohsiung, which is situated at the very South of the island. The choice of transportation is enormous, from a slow train (7 hours), to a fast train (4 hours) to the new high-speed railway (1,5 hours), and a myriad of bus companies. Somehow, we managed to choose probably the most luxurious bus, which only fitted about 20 passengers. (compare that with the El Nido - Puerto Princesa bus in the Philippines, which was half the size, yet fit about 60 passengers) Each passenger gets to sit in an enormous armchair, with a private TV screen and a selection of about 20 TV channels (the only English channel played 3 bad movies during the trip), with a bus attendant who came by about every 15 minutes to offer us water, tea, coffee and biscuits. It wasn't even that expensive, and took about 5 hours. We drove through the Western lowlands, which are densely inhabited, saw a lot of concrete buildings, rice paddies, huge rivers with no water in them, and the mountains (covering the central and western part of the island) in the distance.
Kaohsiung is a big city, whose major attraction include a tall building, busy sea harbor, a river called the Love River (good thing we came a day before the Valentine's day), malls and a night market. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? We got to see some neat fireworks over the love river, apparently marking the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations.
also visited one of many night markets, experimented with the local drinks - like a bamboo juice, and a local version of the pineapple juice - both of them were pretty horrible. Fortunately, the food was much better - like the dim sum on the picture below. Dim sum is a Hongkongese (Cantonese) specialty, dozens of sorts of these small dumplings with a variety of fillings and flavors.
The next day, we joined hordes of locals on a peaceful stroll around the Lotus pond, a lake on the ourskirts of the city. This is a pretty typical Taiwanese recreation area, as it is surrounded by a number of entertainment options (of the fair sort), temples and buildings so typical for any "Chinese" country. The Dragon and Tiger pagodas, which are actually guarded by huge statues of a dragon and a tiger. For good luck, one must enter the complex through the mouth of the dragon and exit it through the tiger. I wasn't able to find out what kind of curse is connected with doing it the other way round.
Just few steps further is this enormous statue of some Chinese god (there are too many of them to be able to tell which one it is). There is a temple inside the statue, and a pond full of turtles outside.
Next stop after Kaohsiung was the nearby city of Tainan, which is said to be the oldest city and a former capital of Taiwan, and currently the fourth largest city. Tainan is apparently famous for its temples and a "unique psyche and atmosphere". Frankly, I haven't noticed any unique atmosphere about the city - same busy roads, same noodle stalls, same Japanese deparment store. Despite it being rather old (maybe 400 years, which is nothing by European standards), it doesn't feel that way, and is actually a modern city with the occasional historical relics scattered around.
Speaking of Tainan, the person who came up with the names of Taiwanese cities must have been someone with a serious lack of imagination. Why?
We live in Tai wan. 台灣
The big city in the north is Tai bei. Bei = north. 台北
The big city in the south is Tai nan. Nan = south 台南
The big city in the east is Tai dong. Dong = east 台東
The big city in the center is Tai zhong. Zhong = center 台中
Does anybody know whether a city called 台西 also exists?
So, upon arrival in Tainan, we set off for the tour of the local temples. Let me tell you something about the Chinese temples. The first visit to one is wonderful. It's all so new, interesting and colorful. The second and third ones are still fun. After that, every other temple seems and feels the same to the average foreigner, ignorant of the fact that this particular temple is the oldest temple dedicated to Matsu, the goddess of the sea.
Anyways, for a brief intro (from my uneducated perspective), temples are mostly Taoist, Budhist, or "Animist" (dedicated to the older, natural religions). They are pretty difficult to tell apart and often actually contains bits of more than one religions.
Some of the things that do happen at a Taiwanese temple:
- People light up incense sticks and bow with them in front of various god statues, making wishes
- Temples contain furnaces, where visitors burn "ghost money", yellow bits of paper, burning of which is supposed to make the ancestors rich in afterlife and therefore happy.
- Fortune-telling in one of several methods.
- Visitors can also write a wish on a little yellow plaque and leave it in the temple to have good luck during the event (many of them ask for good luck with the TOEFL, TOEIC, GMAT..)
- In order to keep the gods happy, food and drinks are placed on the altar. Normally fruits, but bottled fruit and instant noodles (uncooked, still in the plastic bowl) are also seen.
- Celebrations are particularly big around the Chinese new year. Many temples are now decorated by cows (actually, oxes) as we are currently in the year of the ox. People walk through the "tunnel" in the picture, then pet both cows.
- Other than that, the atmosphere in the temples is pretty relaxed. People watch TV, read newspaper, chat, children play around.
Also in Tainan, we ran into a "gathering of puppet fans". I've heard of this before, but never had the chance to witness it with my own eyes. What is this then? There are these Taiwanese (probably) puppets (see below), and a subculture of people, who love them. I don't know whether the puppets are used just a decoration, or to play theater with, or whether they have some old, deep meaning. Several times though, I've seen a TV show featuring these - like a cartoon, except the characters are not animated. Anyways, so we came into a little park with a pond in the middle, and around it, there were dozens of people, carrying around these puppets, chatting about them, arranging them in a variety of settings and taking pictures of them.
Some people take it to the next level, so to speak, and actually dress themselves up as their puppet heroes, parade around in these wonderful costumes and take loads of pictures.
Next stop on the trip was Fenqihu, on the way to Alishan. The Alishan area is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Taiwan. The village lies at the altitude of about 2200 meters, and is surrounded by much higher mountain peaks. Apparently, it is famous for neat sun rises, cherry trees and a train that goes up there. The train has been around for about 100 years and travels from an altitude of 30 meters, all the way up to 2200, in about 4 hours, which apparently makes it one of only 3 trains in the world to do something like that. The ride was nice, but at the end of the day, just a train ride. I suppose all the unique things about it are appreciated mostly by the train freaks, the rest of us just don't see the magnitude.
Anyways, Fenqihu is a nice village in the mountains, surrounded by the forests and some nice walking trails. We stayed at a hostel run by the local catholic church (how did that get there?), operated by a missionary from Poland and two very old nuns, one from Germany, the other one from Switzerland. The Polish guy surprised me by speaking very good Slovak, and the two very old nuns in turn shocked by their fluent Chinese.
After a few days in the mountains, we headed back to Taipei. On the way, we finally got to see one of Taiwan's most remarkable sights. The Binlang xishi, or Betel nut beauties. For a brief background, the Betel nut is a seed of some tree which, when chewed, has stimulating effects, much like caffeine for example. Chewing the nuts is popular among many Taiwanese, truck drivers in particular, and the nuts are widely available. At some point, a clever businessman realized the simple truth that most truck drivers are men, and that men are drawn by young, attractive women with revealing clothing. It was only a short step from there to establishing glass booths on roadsides, inside which said young and attractive girls with little clothing on sit and sell the betel nuts. The trend spread quickly until the booth were all over Taiwan and the Binlang girl was a universally known phenomenon. To the uneducated eye, this may look very much like Amsterdam's red light district, and indeed many foreigners at first assume that the girls are actually prostitutes.
Unfortunately, some more prudent city councils (like Taipei) didn't like these booths, so they simply prohibited them. That's why no betel nut girls can be seen in Taipei. It seems that the trend is on a decline, as we haven't seen too many of them even in the south, but they were there nevertheless. I don't have any good pictures of my own, so I borrowed this one from a betelnut girl fan discussion board (yep, they have that!).
One last random Taiwanese fact to share: They have a different way of telling the age here. Therefore, a person who is 20 years old by the Western counting will claim to be 21 years old here. Why? Apparently, the counting of age starts at one, i.e. when a child is born, it is one year old, not zero years old like we say everywhere else.
On top of all, my identity has changed quite a bit in Taiwan. I just received my National health insurance card. The only name it says on it is: 楊伯瑞. And the date of birth says 74/01/23. I'm suddenly 35 years old now! Of course this is just because of the Taiwanese calendar, in which 1911 was year 0, but I'm afraid I can't use the card as a valid ID anywhere outside Taiwan. It will be handy if I ever need to get into some establishment which only admits people over 30 though.
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