I talked to Jose on Friday evening and we agreed that I would come up to Taichung for the day on Sunday. I had the option of taking the high-speed train (HSR), or the slower train, or a bus. By the time you take a shuttle out to the Tainan HSR station and then another shuttle into Taichung from the HSR station there, you don't save a lot of time versus the other options, so I decided to go by bus this time, since Jose thought it was faster than the slower train, and the price is right (150 NTD, or about $5).
So on Saturday I walked over to the bus station to make sure I knew where it was rather than trying to find it Sunday AM, and it was a good thing I did since Google maps indicated it was located in a different place than it really was, and so I walked around for a bit before I found my way there. I took a few pictures in the vicinity which are posted below, to show a little more of Tainan. I included the picture of the scooter riders since scooters are so ubiquitous here, and to show the masks that probably half the riders use to protect themselves from the smog. I don't find air quality all that bad here, but I guess plenty of people are worried enough about it that they don't just wear the masks when they're on the scooters, but I've seen people wearing them inside Starbucks and other indoor places too -- even some sales clerks in the deparment store apparently keep their masks on all day long. Seems a little extreme, but maybe they'll live longer or healthier than the rest of us!
Sunday morning I walked back over there to get on a 9:16 bus to Taichung, using the bus company that Jose recommended since he thought it had nicer buses than the other options. There were three seats to a row, with the aisle splitting them with two on one side and one on the other. Jose had told me that each seat came with its own little TV with lots of channels for both domestic and foreign movies and shows, and while he was right about having my own TV, he was wrong about the numerous channels, and with only 3 or 4 to choose from, and only one in English, I decided just to read my book instead. Taiwan's countryside isn't all that scenic down in the lowlands, although the stand-alone houses that get built out in the middle of all the wet fields can be interesting in their own way. The highway the bus takes between cities is far enough inland that I don't really understand where all that water comes from. I guess it's irrigation, and I suppose if they're growing rice they need the fields to be pretty inundated, but it still amazes me how much of the land is covered by at least a few inches of water.
Jose met me at the Chaoma bus station in downtown Taichung, and we first drove around the downtown area a bit where I took some pictures of some of the buildings we passed by. The Festival of Lanterns is coming up, and there was an exhibition going on in a park downtown, with some kind of show scheduled for that night that we planned to come back for. Since the recent new year just marked the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit, there were a lot of big rabbit "lanterns" on display. Jose also pointed out the big new city government building, and I joked that it was definitely the "black box" of government!
We then drove up to Tunghai University where Jose is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy and Management. We stopped first at his office, where the electricity was out in the building and a loudspeaker kept announcing something to that effect. Apparently there had been a break-in not too long ago where some had stolen computers out of a number of faculty offices. They caught pictures of the perpetrator on the security cameras, but they didn't catch the perpetrator, which makes you wonder what good the cameras are! We then walked up a hill through some trees and out onto a little street with lots of shops and food places where the students can get good cheap food. We stopped in at a ramen place for lunch, and then did a little more sightseeing around campus, including a stop at the Luce Memorial Chapel, named after Rev. Henry W. Luce who was an American missionary in China in the late 19th century. We also got some ice cream made from the milk from some dairy cows that the university owns -- they used to provide free fresh milk for the Tunghai faculty back in the day, but now they are used to make the ice cream which generates a little revenue on the side!
Next we headed out to the primary activity planned for the day, a trip to The Sun Hot Spring and Resort. Jose apparently had just recently learned about this place up in the hills outside the city and had gone there once with Yu Li. Taiwan has a number of hot springs on the island, and in my various trips here I've had the chance to visit two or three of them. Sometimes the springs are close to the surface and easily feed the pools used to soak in, but Jose said here they had to drill down a ways to tap the hot springs. In any case, the facility was very nice. A 500 NTD entrance fee provided access to the public areas, which included an outdoor coed area that required bathing suits, as well as gender-separated indoor areas where au naturel was de rigueur. We opted for the latter, and in addition to both a dry sauna and a steam sauna, there were five pools of with different water temperatures -- warm, warmer, and hot, as well as cool and cold (the water temperatures were listed on LED readouts, down to the tenth of the degree C, but we don't think they were necessarily accurate). We spent a couple hours there, moving between the pools with occasional stints in the sauna (it wasn't appropriate to take pictures, of course). Jose said that the rooms at the resort also have big baths in them that you can use instead of (or in addition to) the public areas, and I told him that I want to go back sometime when the weather is a little nicer to use the outdoor pools as well.
Once we were water-logged, we got dressed and went upstairs to play a few games of pool before heading out to find some dinner. It had turned rainy while we were inside, so we drove down the road a bit before stopping for what Jose said would be a small bite before heading back into town, but we ended up ordering what turned out to be fairly big meals. We got a starter of fried tofu with a sauce to dip it in, and then for my main dish I had sort of a chicken stew, cooked with with garlic, onions, and chilis, along with side dishes of cold scrambled eggs mixed with corn, some green vegetable, some bite-sized chunks of what Jose explained was chopped up fish meat mixed with some kind of powder, a little bowl of soup with a chunks of potato or some other tuber, carrot, and cilantro, and of course some rice.
We left the restaurant around 9:30, and just down the road we saw another exhibit of large rabbit lanterns, lit up in the rainy night, so I snapped a couple pictures before we headed back into downtown Taichung to go back to the exhibit we had seen earlier in the day. Given that it was now 10 PM, and it was a cold, rainy night, there weren't too many people there, and even though Jose wanted to park the car and walk around a bit, I wasn't all that keen on getting wet, plus I still had a two-hour bus ride to take before getting home. So we circled around the area for a few more photos before heading back to the bus station where I bought a ticket and immediately boarded the 10:32 bus back to Tainan. Jose had explained that rain was pretty common in Taichung and the northern part of the island during winter, but that "it never rained" in Tainan and the southern part. Well, the rain lasted the whole way home, and since it was nice when I had left in the morning it didn't even occur to me to bring an umbrella, so I quickly walked back to my room in the rain and got in by 1 AM. Still time for a good night sleep prior to meeting with Yungnane at 10:30 the next morning.
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