Sally woke up early and got us tickets on the high speed train back to Taipei. This fast train takes less than two hours while the regular train takes more than four. The only problem with the high speed train is that this is a completely new rail system and the stations are outside of the cities, instead of in the center of the city like the normal train stations. It’s an expensive cab ride.
I like Tainan. This is a T-shirt and shorts town, not fashion conscious like Taipei. Things seem to be move a bit slower here, maybe because of the heat or because this isn’t a center of business or government like Taipei. People here are perhaps a bit less polite than the hyper-polite folks of Taipei, but they still are very friendly once you connect with them.
What I don’t like is the motor scooter driving here. There isn’t much public transportation, unlike Taipei, so it seems like every single person has a motor scooter and no one knows the traffic laws. People ride through red lights, drive the wrong way on streets, drive down every inch of sidewalk looking for parking spots, and cut across the places where pedestrians stand when they are waiting for a light.
Today we went to Anping, the first settlement on Taiwan in the 1660s. The Dutch built a fort there and some aborigines came and created a settlement next to it. We went to the remains of the fort and then walked down nearby Yangping Road, one of the original market streets on Taiwan.
What about temples, you ask? There are more temples in the relatively small Anping area than you could visit in a day. We did go to the most important temple, the first Matzu temple in Taiwan. Koxinga (the general who conquered the Dutch, remember?) brought Matzu statues with him from China and they build this temple to house them and as a place to pray for safety on the seas. The Japanese destroyed the temple when they gained control of Taiwan in the late 1800s but the temple was rebuilt in the 1960s and the original Matzu statues, which somehow survived the Japanese, were collected and put into the new temple.
It’s still the celebration of Matsu’s birthday so the temple area was full of people cooking, cleaning, setting things up, and preparing for performances. The area was also full of dozens of tables covered with offerings that worshippers brought. This included every time of food you could imagine as well as a couple of cases of Taiwan beer.
When we went into the temple, the atmosphere was more solemn. There was a temple attendant reading a prayer in the front of the hall and a group of monks chanting (using wireless microphones) in front of the main altar. There was a stream of people coming through the temple to worship but no buzz of people talking about preparations or other non-worship matters like in the Grand Matzu temple in downtown Tainan.
We left there and wandered until we ran across a very pretty Guanyin temple not far from Matsu’s temple. This wasn’t a large temple but the walls were beautifully carved with lines of text and depictions of what I presumed were important events. The door guardians were fifteen feet tall and very colorful.
As we looked for another landmark we wandered down some alleys into old style houses with little courtyards. Sally said that Taipei used to look like that which is hard for me to believe.
We did sample two famous Anping treats. We stopped at Chou’s and had shrimp rolls and coffin cakes. To make a coffin cake you cut of f the top, hollow it out so it looks like a coffin, add vegetables and a sauce and then put the lid back on. Both treats were very good.
It was hot and sticky so we took a cab back to the hotel and took a break. In the evening we walked down to our favorite vegetarian restaurant and had a wonderful meal. We walked back slowly, watched a Bruce Lee movie and that was the day.
BTW, the hotel is filling up. Tour buses are starting to disgorge large numbers of tourists into the hotel. Also we discovered that the amazing breakfast buffet is costing us $1000 NT ($30 US) every day—this compares to the free breakfasts at all the other hotels. We’re not doing that again.
Back to Taipei tomorrow
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