Our last day here in the hot south of Taiwan. It was a bit of a later start as the list for our second day trip to Tainan was a lot shorter and more walkable than what was on the docket for the previous day. Being a Saturday, everything felt busier – which was typified by us having to wait for a while for a train that would allow us on.
Hey ho, all that meant was that we had a proper excuse to try a Taiwanese train bento. This was a pork chop bento, which also came with an egg, fish cake and a piece of tofu. Was it the best bento I’ve ever had? No, but I would easily buy this if it was available in the UK. Especially for this price.
So we ended up in Tainan a bit later than we’d first expected, but we’re here to make the most of it. The first destination was Chikan Tower. Together with the Anping Old Fort, this is one of the iconic buildings in Tainan. If you can’t guess where this is going considering the past few days… let me reveal that this too was covered in scaffolding. There’s a saying that things come in threes, so I guess this was bound to happen once more before we left for home.
A smaller building was left out to actually make sense of paying the regular ticket entry to go in. It was fine and the surroundings were nice enough, but when you got a peak at the actual tower through the scaffolding… well it just made things feel a little bit sad as it really is just that much grander. I think maybe if it was less humid, I would have been in better spirits to make the best of it but, for now, I’m just glad I didn’t get a Tainan souvenir with the tower on it from the Anping Old Street market.
Across the road is the Tainan Grand Mazu Temple. Mazu is everywhere in this area, which makes sense since this is a coastal city and she is a water deity. The temple complex itself is deceptively large with many smaller temple buildings all nestled into each other.
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Like the Luerman temple we saw yesterday, there is a room to ask the gods for help in matters of love – complete with a wall of pictures of successful and in love couples. This is, again, next to a room where a many-armed deity is front and centre – so I am assuming this is a common pairing that I need to learn about. Something for the 5 hour layover tomorrow evening maybe.
Since it was very hot and sticky we tried to find some bubble tea… but a bit of confusion at the checkout meant we ended up with a taro milk instead. It was still nice though, especially since it had actual taro chunks blended in rather than the powder we get back in the UK.
We also took this as a chance to get some lunch from a very busy bakery. All the signs were in Chinese characters, so we took a punt and got four rolls to share completely at random. The first was a sausage bun, slight crispness because it had been finished out with a bit of a melted butter sear. The second with the seeds on top turned out to be a red bean bun. The little ones where there were two in the pack was something akin to a soft French toast kind of a bun. The largest one is… still a bit of a mystery. I think it was like some kind of chicken and pineapple curry bread with cheese – it was nice but I just want to know what it was!
I won’t dwell too much on our visit to Shennong Street. This is meant to be an old shopping street worth having a peruse through. We walked through, and didn’t really feel the need to stop. Moving on.
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A bit of a walk away was a really lovely patch of Tainan, the Blueprint Cultural Park. It’s about a block of buildings that is completely pedestrianised, there is plenty of art work and the shops are all crafty and independent. That also meant some of the prices were a bit steep, but we found a lovely shop to get some presents for the family. Not going to elaborate further as I found out today that my mother-in-law will probably be reading this before we can give her the gift.
I wish there were more spots like this in Tainan as it really was this beautiful patch of quiet and harmony – all with cute blue robots. Still, it is good that this exists and maybe means that more spaces like this can have the room to develop.
Our final stop in Tainan was the Hayashi Department Store. This was an old-style Japanese department store that is still in operation and, in places, really feels like you are shopping somewhere that is a bit out of time. I really loved a lot of the things for sale on the ‘Innovative Designs’ floor – something where I can imagine that, if I were more local, there are plenty of things I would want for my home.
At the very top of the store is an observation rooftop and a Shinto shrine that was completed within the first year of the store’s operation. It is a shrine to the patron God of the store and is just a nice and simple reminder of this store’s origins.
The fifth floor of Hayashi has a café and, since we had some time to kill before our reserved train back, we popped in for a cooling dessert. This pineapple shaved ice was massive and was pretty incredible. Thanks to it having a mix of pineapple syrup, candied pineapple and jelly cubes at the bottom – there was so enough variation in the textures and strength of flavour that it never got boring to eat.
We made it back to Kaohsiung by five in the afternoon. Whilst we knew this had an anime store, we didn’t quite get that it had most of a floor of general geekery. So, we ended spending a bit too much on geek stuff, but more on that in a bit.
For dinner, we just wanted a sit down dinner – so we went to Hanshin Arena, where there are a wide selection of restaurants to pick from. Originally we tried to get into the hot pot restaurant, as that’s something we’ve not done in Taiwan before, but the queue was ridiculous. This is how we ended up going for a restaurant that provided one of my favourite Japanese things: okonomiyaki. Specifically the Hiroshima style of okonomiyaki.
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Between us we shared some takoyaki, a pork yakisoba and a cheese topped mixed okonomiyaki. I do not believe that everything tastes better with cheese on… but this certainly did. Especially as okonomiyaki sauce contains a lot of similar flavours to Worcestershire sauce. Definitely one of the nicest versions of okonomiyaki I’ve ever had.
That leaves me with what has become a picture of our souvenir haul over the last week and a half. This picture does not include the presents we have gotten for other people, but honestly this picture shows enough. Unpacking these is really going to make things easier as try to readjust out body clocks.
Tomorrow is an almost half day in Kaohsiung, so there will be one more post in this series. Also going to be another scorcher, which makes me glad I thought ahead on laundry day to make sure I had a clean set of clothes for flying. Hopefully we’ll be able to tick off the last bit of food I was hoping to try whilst here.
Before I Kick 