Day 9 - Tainan

Today we traveled from Kaohsiung to Tainan via train.

We began with a nice breakfast at The Ambassador Hotel. This was the first hotel that offered breakfast on premises, it was included with our room. Nice buffet, nothing too out of the ordinary. Coffee was bad, but we soon discovered they had an espresso machine, so that was a bit better.

We took took our time checking out of our hotel before taking a taxi to the train station, bought our tickets and took a 35 minutes train ride to Tainan. Tainan is a city of 800,000 people, 4^th largest in Taiwan. It was the original Capital of the country. We arrived just after noon and checked into our hotel, just a few blocks from the Rail Station. We stayed at the Hotel Tainan.

Once checked in we went out to explore. It was raining, so we decided to stop for some lunch before proceeding to some of the ancient buildings that make up the tourist sights here.

We ate at a Sushi Express, which is a sushi restaurant chain, where they make all different types of sushi and place the dishes on a conveyor belt. You sit at a counter and pick-up whichever plates you would like. Each plate has 2 pieces of sushi on it and cost $30 (just under $US1) each. 

Once done, the waitresses counts up the number of plates and charges you accordingly. Brad and I had about 20 plates between us. So a really good sushi lunch ended up costing us around $US20, which included tea and seaweed salad and soup.

After lunch we walked to Chihkan Tower, an old fortress that was originally built by the Dutch around 1650 and later captured by the Chinese. It was pretty cool but all the time we were there it was raining. Not just raining, but pouring. We made the best of it.

After we left Chihkan Tower, we crossed the street to check out Official God of War Temple – small yet still in use. It was still pouring rain. We decided we wanted to see the Confucius Temple, but on the way the rain came down even harder. We ducked into a cold drink shop, ordered a funky drink of some kind of medicinal jello combined with lemonade.

Surprising good. As we were sitting there we checked the weather forecast and it wasn't looking good for at least another week. Given that our plan was to spend 2 days in Tainan walking to the different sights and enjoying the night markets that this town is known for, we decided, after checking the weather forecast for Taipei, that it made most sense to just spend the one night here and then take a high speed train to Taipei. Taipei offers more, even if the weather there turns on us.

We booked a room for Friday night at the same hotel I had started at, Hotel Flowers, not far from the Taipei Main Station.

After sitting in the tea shop for at least an hour, we finally decided to try to catch a taxi and go hang out in the one modern department store. We ended up hanging around the store for 3 hours and once we got outside, it was still raining quite hard. Fortunately, our hotel was just around the corner, so we made our way there.

After a short rest we decided to eat dinner in the Cantonese Restaurant just downstairs in our hotel. They had a buffet, but very different from any buffet I've been to. While they had a few chafing dishes with some food in them, the key here was to order whatever and as much as you wanted from their menu and each dish was made to order. Brad did a great job ordering. We had a few small plates of various seafood dishes, then a few plates of meat type dishes. It was Cantonese food like I've never had before. Some were really, really good while others were not so good.

It was still pouring rain after dinner, so we went upstairs to our room. Brad's been watching TV and I've been updating the blog as we have internet access here.

Tainan has been a bit if a disappointment, but it's really due to the rainy weather. There are quite a few historic sites to see and a few different night markets to explore. The activities are all outside and there's no subway system. If it was a light rain it wouldn't have been an issue, but the rain here has been torrential. Given the circumstances, heading a few hundred miles north to better weather makes the most sense to us.

Tomorrow is my last full day here. The High Speed Rail will get us back to Taipei in about 2.5 hours, so we'll leave in the morning and have an afternoon and evening there to do some shopping and eating.