#11 South Taiwan – Kaohsiung

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been traveling in South Taiwan for the past few days. I would get tired at the end of the day and didn’t feel like updating my blog. So today and tomorrow I am taking it easy and just relaxing while updating my blog at the same time.

Taipei is the capital and the largest city in Taiwan. There are still many things to see there but I decided to take the high speed train (which I will talk about in a different post) to South Taiwan. Kaohsiung is the second largest city in Taiwan with a population of 3 million; it’s the largest shipping port in Taiwan and the 6th largest shipping port in the world. The city is very industrial and there’s very few sight seeing. I stayed with my friend Rebecca and her husband Carl with their little cute daughter Leila. They were very generous and I had a good time sharing and comparing things between Canada and Taiwan. One of the things that Carl told me which I found fascinating, he said if Canada has the same population density per square km as Taiwan, the total population of Canada would be 6.3 billion people.

While in Kaohsiung I visited the love river, the National Yat-Sen University. It was interesting to see a university that’s right on the Pacific Ocean. It gives the motivation to be at the university not necessarily to study 🙂 just to do some sports or outdoors’ activities. To get to the university you go through a tunnel in a mountain in a way there’s only the university behind the mountain so they only passed the tunnel to avoid cutting the mountain and to allow a passage through, very interesting.
Inside the university campus, I met a man in his 60s who was walking on beach rocks. You tend to find similar little rocks in public parks to massage the feet. He told me he walks on these rocks for about 30 minutes every day, believe me that’s not easy, I couldn’t last more than one minute. He claims that it improved his vision since he started doing this activity for the past few months. The most thing I admire about the elderly here is their active life; they do a lot of outdoor activities like Tai-chi, relaxing, stretching or anything in order to move and be outside.

I also visited the former British consulate at Takao which has a little restaurant in the court yard that has a very nice view of the harbor and the light house. I had the afternoon tea which is offered with some fruits and dessert. There were a lot of tourists from mainland China who tend to come in big numbers especially now that China economy is booming so the mainlanders have more disposable income to spend on tourism.
In the evening I went with my friends to eat some shaved ice and had dinner at a Teppanyaki restaurant – were the chefs prepare the food in front of you. The food was very delicious. Later in the evening I went to the Love river, which has some nice restaurants along the sides.