Exploring Kaohsiung

I spent a lot of time walking around today, both purposely and inadvertently exploring the city. My legs are sore, I'm tired, and my body is still covered in a thin film of sweat, but it was wonderful.

Around 1pm today, Rachel and Brittany decided to go out for a walk, and I decided to join them, interpreting their plan to be a quick jaunt which would quickly terminate with a bite to eat. We got back to the apartment around 4pm, fed, yes, but also exercised and sweaty, having walked a good 50 or so blocks  in 21* Celsius heat with 84% humidity--the heat index put it at 42* Celsius, meaning that it "felt like" 107* Fahrenheit. Brittany's from DC and Rachel went to school in Florida, but I've got to say, nothing in Seattle or Eugene prepared me for this sort of all-pervasive HEAT!

The other, less exhausting aspect of the trip, though, was that we got to get a better sense of where we are in the city and how it's laid out--we walked along one of the major streets we'd driven over before, and followed it from from section 1 through section 3; the city is laid out in numbered quadrants, so if we had kept going, we could have gone through section 10. We knew this from talking to Fonda, but it was nice to see the quadrants change on the street signs as we walked, and to get a sense of how big each one was.

We also continued to soak up the culture, as we first discovered that many street food vendors (including our favorite seller of onion pancakes) are closed on Sundays, but then found that, if you keep walking long enough, you can still find plenty to eat. In fact, even on a Sunday, there are shops all along every major sidewalk, selling stinky tofu (unfortunately), fried meats, and, most especially, TEA. We probably saw four tea stores every block, which was a bit of a frustration for me as I was on the look-out for one of my favorite things here so far, watermelon milk. Eventually my thirst drove me to settle for grapefruit green tea--which was also delicious, and the juice for which the lady squeezed by hand in front of me while I watched--but the disparity was amazing.

Sights from our walk in Kaohsiung:

The city street, complete with bikes, scooters, street vendors, and one of the ubiquitous 7-11 stores you find everywhere around here.

Dogs on scooters? Why not!

When we got back, Karina informed me that the church she and I had decided to visit today, Kaohsiung International Church, had their English service at 5:30pm, and that, based on her research, in order to get there on time we would need to leave around 4:45. After a quick scramble to get ready, we set off for the MRT, where we duly transferred from the Orange line to the Red line at Formosa Boulevard, then got off at Kaohsiung Arena and took the exit toward Yucheng Rd.

Then we ran into a difficulty: the streets Karina had duly copied down for us to take were nowhere to be seen. She had written them in pinyin, the alphabetic transliteration of Chinese characters, but we remembered then that in Taiwan, they use a different system of transliterating Chinese words, and, while not knowing what characters we should be looking for, our Anglicized versions were not only wrong, but illegible to those people we stopped on the street to ask where we were going (Karina speaks Mandarin quite well). 

After two students just shook their heads at our little map, a guy with a backpack pointed us the wrong way, a man in a gambling room pointed us to a closed-up building, and several random wrong turns, we discovered from an apartment doorman that we were in the wrong district altogether, and that it would take 15 minutes by scooter to get where we wanted to go; at this point, it was already 15 minutes after the service was supposed to start. We were also unsure as to whether he was right after all, or if we would arrive where he pointed us and have nothing else to do but continue to wander around as we had been doing for the past 20 minutes. Also, we were hungry.

So we told him thank you, pretended to take his directions, and hopped aboard the MRT again, defeated and headed for home. But the adventure wasn't quite over. When we got back to our stop, we set out to find the "Noodle Lady," a friend of Fonda's who sells delicious noodles and whom we had met before, but of the location of whose shop we had only a vague idea. When we did find it (hooray for good guesses!), we discovered that, as I had known before but somehow forgotten, she too is closed on Sundays. Oh well. We had a nice little dinner at a store next door, sitting in the abandoned basement dining room as they bizarrely played samba music over the loudspeakers, and then stopped in at a little bakery with Jamba-style enthusiasm on the way back for some sort of chocolate-covered chocolate cream-filled cake on a stick. It was quite tasty.

But for all that wandering through the sticky hot day and night, I arrived back at the apartment without having achieved my two goals of watermelon milk and a church service. And so I consoled myself with water and a podcast by Judah Smith in the comfort of my air-conditioned room, together with the knowledge that I now know Kaohsiung that much better.