Tainan: The Continuing Story

Well, to continue where I left off...

The next morning I filled myself on taro buns (which I adore) at the hotel breakfast and then we piled back onto the bus to go to an elementary school that was big into energy efficiency, or something like that.  We had lunch there too and I found out that food in Tainan (by now I knew that we were in Tainan County for sure) is known for being sweet.  And sure enough, everything was sweet (and cold).  The vegetables, the meat, the other mixed dishes…it was alright, but I couldn’t really get into it.

This is a view of rice paddys from the school.  It was super beautiful.  I'm afraid the picture doesn't do it justice.

After that we toured The Magic School of Green Technology, which is a university.  I asked why it was called magic and they said it was just an adjective.  Well, I know that, but I wanted to know why that was picked over some other adjective, but I never did find out.

Anyway, then we went to a clothing factory that became really eco-friendly after they had had a fire a few years ago.  The ironic thing was that I smelled burning rubber the whole time we were there, but that could have been coming from any of the neighboring buildings I suppose.  It seemed to me that we were there a really long time.  Then I thought we were finally going to leave but we just went outside to walk around their “Happy Farm” which was a little farm on the company’s property.  I don’t really know who tends to it, but I do know that it was getting dark and I was famished. 

These bears were positioned around the company building and the smiling bear brought
me some joy at a very hungry low-point

We finally left and went to a restaurant and the first dish they brought out was fried rice, which was delicious.  After that the next several dishes were seafood and I didn’t have any but everyone started asking about if I was a vegetarian so I just said that I didn’t eat seafood, but after that every dish that came they’d be like, “Can she eat it?”  Well, I felt kind of bad so the next dish that came out I just went ahead and grabbed a piece of.  It looked rubbery so I figured it’d just be squid or something I could choke down.  Well, I couldn’t chew it at all because of it’s rubberyness and it tasted incredibly sour and just not a flavour I wanted in my mouth so I just swallowed the piece whole.  It didn’t really seem like the squid I’ve had before and I made the mistake of asking what it was.  “The inside of a pig.”  Oh…

Somehow I found myself putting on a huge smile and saying something like, “Oh! I’ve never tried this before! Mmmm.”  Then I promptly drank some tea and began to eat fish to get the taste out of my mouth (which just tells you how much I didn’t like the intestines!).

By the time we got to our new hotel in Tainan city it was too late to see any of the city, which was unfortunate because I’ve heard it’s a really cool place.  In fact, I know several people who say it’s their favourite city in Taiwan.  But I used the massage chair in the hotel gym and also found a bowl of bananas there, which I helped myself to.

This hotel had cereal at their breakfast so I was all over that on Saturday morning.  It was amazing.  Our only stops for that day were some kind of museum, which seemed to have everything in it.  There was a natural history part, and a part about inventions and history of that nature, a part with a bunch of old guns and tools, a part with lots of plants and grains, a part with information about aquatic animals and I think some other sections but I don’t remember what they were.  It was pretty interesting to look at, although I didn’t always know what I was looking at.

Next we went to see a water buffalo.  At least that’s what I thought.  Then they said it was the water buffalo’s house, but he had died this summer (it wasn’t the same water buffalo as the Togo village though, I checked).  Anyway, to me this place just looked like a little farm.  It was nice though.  Actually, it was my favourite place we visited on the trip because there were two swings hanging from a tree branch that I got to swing on!

Part of the farm

I was loving the swing

This is the old man who told us about everything.  Apparently the water buffalo lived in that little building right behind him (it looked really nice inside for a water buffalo though).  I believe this man lives on the farm

After this we just had to stop for lunch and then begin the long ride home.  They were saying there were two options for the soup and we had to pick right then so they knew what to order once we got to the restaurant.  I asked what the options were and they said, “fish ball…” and before I heard the rest I thought, “Oh I’ll get the other one” (I can’t get into fish ball soup, or actually fish ball anything, though I’ve tried) but then I heard the rest of the sentence: “…or blood soup.”  Well, fish ball it is.  But then I found out they were also getting some kind of rice thing too so I opted to just eat that and skip the soup entirely.  That was definitely a good decision.

The bus ride home was fairly uneventful.  It took about 5 hours or so and the last two and a half we had karaoke.  Some people were pretty into it and every now and then from the back of the bus I would hear, “Charissa! English song! English song!” Each time I just kind of gave a nervous chuckle because I didn’t know what else to do.  Picking out an English song to sing didn’t seem like a great option to me.  Then at a rest stop one of the teachers came up and said, “Charissa. We are the world.”  It took me a couple times to understand even what he was saying but then I realized he wanted me to sing We are the World.  Well, as fun as that would be, I knew I didn’t know the tune well enough to sing the whole thing even with the words, but after that I paid more attention to the songs coming up incase someone had just gone ahead and requested it for me.  I never did sing anything though, which was fine, because there was never really a lull during those 2.5 hours so I figured there was no reason to take their fun away by taking a turn myself.  So here's a video I tried to discretely take of the singing.  Pretty much all the singing was behind me so I didn't want to turn around to actually tape the singer, but I guess this way you can imagine exactly what the ride was like for me.  This particular song was in Taiwanese.

All in all, it was quite the trip.  I was glad to get back to Luodong for the rest of the weekend, but I think it was worth the trip.  Definitely an interesting experience.