Kaohsiung - Taiwan

Kaohsiung is a much more cosmopolitan city than Tainan. We only spent one day there.

The buildings in both Tainan and Kaohsiung have similar style except the town is a bit larger and more upscale. I saw a few more stores I was familiar with as we walked around.

We went with Danny's cousin, aunt and uncle to look around the campus of the school where his cousin had gone to college. It was a very scenic campus. The symbol on the ceiling is from the Taiwan flag.

Apparently at Zhong Shan University instead of mouse or bug problems they have stray dogs and monkeys. Danny's cousin Eric told us stories about a monkey breaking into his dorm room and stealing his food. I was really hoping we would see a monkey as we walked around but no such luck. We did see some signs that said don't feed the monkeys though.

After we got really tired from walking around the really hilly campus in the heat we went to an area called Fisherman's Wharf and met his other cousin for dinner.

The next day we had a brief chance to look around by ourselves and see another shrine.

Then we met his other aunt, uncle and cousins for lunch at the tallest building in Kaohsiung. The restaurant was sort of interesting. It was a really fancy building and had a nice view of the whole city. It was sort of trying to be an American restaurant so they had American flags as decorations all over the place and the waiters wore cowboy hats and handkerchiefs. The food wasn't American at all though.

We stopped by their house for a few minutes and tried some fruits that I'd never seen before. The green one tastes like honey dew but is crisper like an apple. The pink one is called dragon fruit and tastes a lot like kiwi.

Before we left, we went with them to see a pagoda, a type of tiered tower with some sort of Buddhist meaning that I wasn't totally clear on. While we were there a whole bunch of monks were also visiting.

From there we took Danny's favorite mode of transportation, the high speed rail, to Taipei.