Richie Post #5:

We rode Ian's scooter to the main Taichung train station and caught a bus from there, to Kaohsiung, (sounds sort of like Caou-shaung), because it's not easy to get to the high speed train station, which is located in another area west of here. The bus was the nice modern cross-country style, and I watched a Canadian movie subtitled in Chinese on the way to Kaohsiung.

We arrived at a metro station similar to the one in back home in DC, only it's cleaner and more modern. To buy a “ticket” you just touch the icon of the station you want to go to on the map of the system, and the vending machine tells you how much money to put in. You get a blue plastic token like a small poker chip that opens the gate when it’s scanned. The area where you wait for the train is enclosed with sliding glass doors that open after the trains have stopped. It’s much quieter when trains arrive, and once underway the speed and smoothness of the cars is very impressive. A man asked us about the election, and I gave him the thumbs up, which seemed to please him. Our system back home was looking pretty bad as the exit gate opened the machine collected the token to be reprogrammed.

It was late afternoon at Kaohsiung’s central park area when we arrived. The streets are wide and the avenues don’t have the cluttered look of Taichung. It’s a clean beautiful city with even more scooters. We walked through their upscale night market and then went to the park where I drank a big frosty mug of Taiwan Beer while we waited for Ian’s girlfriend and her sister to arrive.

We walked to an interesting Chinese looking Italian restaurant where I enjoyed a yummy curry dinner, and ate with a fork for the first time since arriving here. We shared dishes, and agreed that my curry was best, lucky me.

After dinner we went back through one of the night markets and the girls bought me a very cool red T shirt with a skull on it, as skulls are a very popular motif here, and most of the other selections were amazingly gaudy or adorned with strange slogans written in terrible English. It’s actually a little hard to find large sized clothes, and the selection of anything bigger than Medium is limited. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever felt larger than average.

The girls left us at the station, and Ian and I stopped off at the Love River station, and checked out the beautiful waterfront section of town before catching a bus back to Taichung. I slept on the ride home apparently missing a pretty bad American Kung Fu movie, and we arrived back late last night.

Today I'm going to rent another scooter, and we might ride to the beach.