TAINAN

Phil and I had our first day off last Friday (New Year’s Day) since we started working here. It was a different experience for us to work five days a week from August until January. I guess we were spoiled in the past with MEA break in October, Thanksgiving break in November and Christmas break in December.

Anyways, we decided to take advantage of our three day weekend and we did a little traveling in celebration of New Year’s. We spent the weekend in Tainan. Tainan is a little over an hour train ride south of Douliu. At one point it was Taiwan’s capital. (Taipei is now.) Currently, it’s the fourth biggest and the oldest city in the country.

(This is Tainan's beautiful train station.)

Since Tainan is Taiwan’s oldest city, it (this is probably an obvious statement) has the most historical sights. So, most of our time there was spent looking at 300+ year old temples, shrines and other historic places. The nice part about Tainan was the fact that even though it’s a relatively big city, all the sights were within walking distance from each other. And, our trusty Lonely Planet travel book provided us with an excellent map, so we were able to see everything without getting extremely lost! This may have been a first for us! :)

Lonely Planet also provided us with some history behind the sights and some different facts regarding them. Knowing these things made the sights much more interesting. If you’re interested, I’ve provided a link to some of this information below with each sight I’ve listed.

You may notice that almost all the temples have neon fake fronts. We have no idea what this is about. Our only guess is that they were put there because of the New Year’s holiday??? In our opinion, they were a bit tacky and we wish we could have seen the temples’ real fronts, but oh well!

Confucius Temple Grounds

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435082

Koxinga Shrine

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435094

Dongyue Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435084

City God Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435080

(As you may have read in the Lonely Planet link, these pink slips of paper are students' requests for help from the gods to pass different exams.)

Altar of Heaven Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435070

God of War Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435090

Chihkan Towers

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435078

Matsu Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435098

Our hotel room in Tainan was kind of interesting. The floor was raised and we had to put our shoes under the floor, outside the door (we weren’t allowed to wear them in). And, the beds they offered were simply mattresses placed on the floor.

Aside from sightseeing, we also went to a place called Willy’s Second Base Bar and Grill one night. This restaurant was established by a former American MLB player who moved to Taiwan to coach baseball awhile back and ended up marrying a Taiwanese woman, staying in Taiwan and opening this place. Although our Happy Buddha restaurant in Kaohsiung didn’t live up to our expectations, this one did! We enjoyed some food we hadn’t had in more than five months!

Happy New Year!