Any way here's the route we took from Taipei: Taichung→ Kaohsiung→ Pingtung then an overnight trip to up to Tainan and then back to Pingtung.
The trip to Taichung took about 2 hours by bus which wasn't too bad really, at least there was air conditioning and comfortable seats. We were picked up by some family friends and driven back to what appeared to be a newly constructed area. All the buildings were clean and shiny, quite different from back in Taipei. We were treated to a very nice dinner at a hotel buffet. I had never heard of this before but I'm thinking it must not be uncommon here to dine at hotel restaurants since many people were waiting to get into the buffet. During the evening we visited what turned out to be an enormous night market. It started out with a few shops and then grew into a vast expanse of stalls and shops and food vendors selling pretty much everything.
If there is one thing I can say for sure about Taiwan at this point it is that there is a variety of smells that arises on the streets, including potent incense and piles of garbage as well as the amazing scent of different food. The strongest and most repulsive of these smells though belongs to probably one of the stinkiest foods I've encountered, stinky tofu. This food is sold at many of the markets we've visited and on this particular night I agreed to try it out. Well no surprise but it tasted like tofu lol just a little spicy because of the sauce. We wove our way through the busy and cramped streets and I thought to myself "why on earth would you bring kids and older people here?!" because there were old people in wheelchairs or limping with a cane and mothers pushing baby carriages (some with children others full of dogs) trying to push through these crowds! We had a hard enough time getting through I can't imagine how long it takes for them ( >A>; )!
We spent the night at one of the friends new apartments and it was by far the cleanest place we had been in but then again no one had actually been really living there so of course it would be clean. Unfortunately, although it was clean and had a real shower it did not have air conditioning so we were dying in the heat. It was very difficult to sleep because of the temperature but I was grateful to have a bed to sleep on that didn't feel like it was made of wood. We put on face masks to make ourselves feel better and then tried to sleep. I woke up feeling pretty weird and slightly nauseous possibly from how hot it was so I ended up sitting out in the living room and passing out on a beanbag chair aha..
The next day we just sort of drove around a bit and stopped at an art museum along the way. It was a very big museum full of contemporary work. It's nice sometimes to see other artists creations but I really can't linger on everything for long, We headed back out for ice cream and came across this very unique sweet shop that looked like an old bookstore. All the employees wore safari uniforms all and all the candy was wrapped so intricately.We had ice cream at the shop next door called Bee&Milk. They served some different flavors and used real honey comb. I tried the milk tea and honey ice cream and it was amazing but quite a lot of ice cream all for me so I had a hard time finishing it. After our little snack stop we were taken to the train station where we took the Taiwanese version of the bullet train to our next destination~
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