Southern Taiwan & Monkeys!!

WEEK FOUR IN TAIWAN!

 By: Daniel Villasenor

   As I approach my last week here in Taiwan, I decided to take a trip to the south for the longer weekend. After finishing class for the week and experiencing an earthquake here, a my friends and I decided to hop on the Taiwan High Speed Rail. I had never seen a bullet train before, and when I saw one for the first time I got pretty excited to go get on. The bullet train went around 180mph and was able to get ~400 miles in around an hour and a half, which is around the same as LA to San Francisco! After arriving at my hotel, I fell asleep and was very tired but I had to wake up really early the next morning.

   I woke up at around 4:30 am in order to prepare for a morning hike at the Monkey Mountain in Kaohsiung. While the sun began to rise, two locals who were very nice guided us through the mountain and took us to the peak of the mountain where you could see the ocean (and monkeys)! The mountain was really beautiful and I loved the hike even though it was around 89° at 6 am. While walking down I was able to catch a view of the city and began heading back to the hotel to catch some more sleep before going out again to a night market.

   The next day, my group and I decided to head to the Liuqiu Township Island which is known for being home to sea turtles and overall a nice place to visit. I ended up heading down to the beach where I could relax for a bit. The water here was really warm compared to the California coast and I found it to be really nice. After getting some good. We ended up at a deer petting zoo where I got to see and feed deer. Once we decided it was time to head back, we took the ferry back to Kaohsiung and ate some beef noodles before heading back to our hotel. 

   On the third day, we headed to Tainan city by train where we visited a treehouse and ate at a cafe for a bit. Tainan was very hot even though it was raining for a bit. We explored the city a bit more and I had some really good scallion pancakes for lunch. The food was delicious and I enjoyed it so much. We didn’t do too much on this day as we just decided to walk around and see what Tainan was like. We headed back to the hotel for our final day in Kaohsiung and headed to bed.

   After checking out of the hotel, we all decided to go to the docks and see the bridge in Kaohsiung. There were a bunch of art pieces in this part of the city and it had a beautiful view with its bridge. This specific bridge is really cool from an engineering perspective as it is the first bridge in the world to rotate horizontally to allow for boats to pass through during parts of the day. I really enjoyed this part of Kaohsiung and was pretty sad to realize that the global seminar is almost over. We went back to the bullet train and headed toward Taipei for our final week here. 

   I look forward to this last week and I’m really sad that it’s coming to an end. I’ve really loved being in Taiwan.

Best,

Daniel Villasenor