Tuesday, May something

I’m writing this in our somewhat posh room on the 22nd floor in the Far Eastern Shangri-La Something Something—Tainan. The hotel has 37 floors and I think right now we’re almost the only people here. I base that on the fact I have only seen two other people in the building, there’s an elevator immediately available every time we need one, and the staff run over to beg us for something to do every time we go into the lobby. Also, the guy in the gym followed me around the whole time I was in there.


We started the day with breakfast at the Ambience, then got on the “limited express” train to Tainan. That trip covers most of the west coast of Taiwan and only takes four hours. We went through some good sized cities, had views of the central mountain ranges to the east, and saw lots of rice plants and banana trees.

We arrived in Tainan about four and promptly were met at the door of the train station by a cab driver who was trying to take us out of turn. We went over to the first cab in line and he only took us after the dispatcher yelled at him. He took us about five blocks and charged us $100 NT. Well, we’re not in Tapei anymore.

After we checked into our room, we walked into the center of town and began the historic walking tour that’s in the Lonely Planet book. The walk showed us that there is quite a bit of money in this town—we walked past several blocks of obviously expensive mens’ and womens’ clothing stores and some well stocked electronics and music stores.

We made it to the Confucius Temple about 5:30 and found out that it closed a few minutes before. The ancient South Gate of the city was also closed. In fact, most of the historic sites closed around five, which was a change from Taipei.

After walking for a few minutes it was time to find something to eat, the most stressful part of every day it seems. We went to a lane that is supposed to have good food but it was mainly coffee shops and a couple of noodle houses. On the way there I had noticed a nice looking little restaurant on the main street so I suggested we try that. It was clean and had some people in there so we went in.

A guy in the front of the restaurant handed us a menu in English. It was a vegetarian restaurant. There are a lot of vegetarian restaurants in Taiwan because there are a lot of Buddhists but we had never been in one.The diners were a mix of young people, probably students at one of the local universities, and families with young children.

We got two set dinners which included everything from soup to desert and we ordered some dumplings. It turned out to be a huge amount of food with lots of green vegetables and interesting mushrooms. That was a great meal  for about $4 US each. I think we'll go back there at least once since the other dishes we saw looked good too.

We wandered a bit more then came back to Shangri-La, watched a movie and crashed.