April 23, 2015, Thursday, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Rose,our tour guide, said you pronounce this city:  gow shong

 This southern port city is industrial with three sections of the port:  commercial, military, and fishing.  We are close to town and there is a shuttle, but we are on the Glimpse tour.

This port used to export lots of banana, also now they make Giant bicycles and other products "Made in Korea".  They are proud of their products; once again we hear the lament of the poor quality of products from China.

We first visited Lotus Pond, a big park in the central area of town.  There are two pagodas with a dragon and a tiger.  

You can walk into the dragon and come out of the tiger and have good luck.  We walked further to another area of statues.  

This park is relatively new and solidly made of concrete and nicely painted.  In the pond there is a water skiing park with ranps.    I think this will be the future place for tourists to see the ancient city.  Unless mauraders come and destroy it, this area will last a long time.  

There are relief art depicting the life of the gods inside the tunnels of the dragon and tiger. god of war temple.

There are 200,000 temples in Taiwan.  

The ones we saw are very well done and don't seem too old.  Actually Rose said it hasn't been populated for longer than 350 years when a fisherman went off course in a typhoon and discovered abundant fish.

I walked to the end of the pier to see the pagoda in the lake.

Next we drove to the Confuscius temple.  

A wall in front of the temple

The beautiful gate.

Musical instruments inside the temple

The main temple inside the grounds

It was at the other end of the lake.  We could have walked there quicker from the last pagpdas.  I walked out to the pagoda in the middle of the lake but everyone else walked slowly back to the bus.  We made a wish on a card and prayed in the temple to have it come true, and put it on a prayer wall.

Next we drove to the Chijin sandbar area by going under the channel in a mile long tunnel.  We visited the oldest street in town which has a market.  She suggested we eat the fried squid being prepared on the street.  No one was very excited.  But we would not be going back to the ship for lunch.  We wanted to have the Indian sampler on the ship's menu, but it was not going to happen.  We bought some KA KA brand Crispy Shrimp Crackers with the Taiwanese money we had left.  KA KA in Hawaiian means food.

So we looked for something to eat.  I saw a small restaurant with every chair taken and a line, so I thought it might be good food.  Anthony Bordain judges foreign restaurants that way.  It was a noodle shop.  You pick between two different noodles.  Then she warms them in a strainer, puts it in a bowl, then a delicious broth with cabbage, and sprinkle these fried strips of mystery meat.  It was 80 Taiwan dollars which is maybe 3 dollars.  She also squirted two different sauces into the bowl.  It was hot and delicious.  The fried meat was crunchy even in the soup and tasted nutty.  Rose taught us a Taiwanese word:  shwee!  It means beautiful.  Our soup was shwee!  From our photos she told us what we ate which was fried strips of pork, and that this noodle shop was very famous.

Love River

We drove back to the ship through town along the shore.  We also drove by the Love River which she compared to the Seine because it is romantic.  It used to be very poluted.  But now this area is a very clean, modern, easy city.  Our weather was once again warm.  In fact we were hot.

We had dinner with Kay and Darwin Asdahl, our bridge experts onboard.  The entertainment was Jane Rutter playing the French flute.  Beautiful in every way.