Day 32 - A Beautiful Day Of Art, and Walking With Friends In Kaohsuing, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
Day 32 - A Beautiful Day Of Art, and Walking With Friends In Kaohsuing, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
The weather in southern Taiwan continues to be very hot and humid.
Temperatures continue to be in the low 90s, and with the bright sun, the heat index is in the high 90s.
We ate breakfast in the hotel, which had a buffet with a variety of tofu dishes.
I love tofu, so I tried the tofu made from peanuts and an unsweetened tofu pudding that I topped with crunchy sunflower seeds and soy sauce.
We met Wendy and Joseph in the lobby after checking out of our hotel, and walked to see the Confucius Temple in Tainan.
It was built in 1666, the first Confucius Temple in the country.
Before the end of the Manchu Dynasty, it was the highest official institute of higher learning in Taiwan.
The Confucius Temple has been through more than thirty periods of reconstruction, when parts of the building were destroyed during wars or ruined by natural disasters.
It has a fish pond, old trees, gates and a harmonious design and peaceful feeling.
It is the way schools should be built in harmonious societies, instead of the gated utilitarian schools that we have today, that resemble prisons built of concrete.
Then we took the train to the city of Kaohsiung, where we stopped walking yesterday.
In Kaohsiung, we left our backpacks at our new hotel, had a break at Starbucks and then went to the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts.
We walked around the vast gardens and grounds of the Museum, looking at their large collection of outdoor sculpture.
When the sun felt like it was melting us down, we entered the museum to look at the art.
But we needed to refresh ourselves, and decided to eat lunch before we enjoyed the museum.
The ground floor has a cool looking restaurant where we sat to enjoy a delicious lunch.
It was a set menu that included lotus root and sweet green peas, red rice, seaweed soup, and three vegetable side dishes, plus an Oolong Tea and a mochi dessert.
After lunch, we went upstairs to look at the art.
I have mixed feelings about art museums.
I don’t always love them.
As an artist, I love looking at art and I do it often, but I have seen so much art, that I am picky about what I want to see.
I want to see something new and exciting to me.
Something that is creative and will expand my horizons, or move me in some way.
I am not interested in seeing French impressionist paintings for the hundredth time, nor post impressionist art, which I have seen so many times before.
I have also seen so much American abstract expressionism, as well as pop art, that I really wouldn’t feel excited to spend the day looking at it yet again.
We entered the exhibition spaces, spread out over four floors.
The special touring exhibition explored the intersections of painting and photography, featuring many of the giants of contemporary art over the last 150 years.
It was a beautiful exhibition.
But the more interesting art was on the upper floors of .the museum.
There was striking art made from dried banana peels, a moving exhibit about aborting baby girls in Korea, because they are less desirable than boys, and a touching exhibition about how widespread suicide is.
There was an exhibition about the human body as a landscape, and beautiful paintings mimicking traditional Chinese ink paintings, that were done by burning coals and using the ashes, that was actually about air pollution in Asia.
Overall, it was an exciting museum.
We walked for hours and didn’t even feel that had been standing on our feet for so long.
It was getting late in the day, but we all walked along the river to the restored shipping pier 2 area, that had been turned into art galleries, cafes and small shops.
Along the way we visited the Yancheng 1st Public Market, which is a cute old market that has gotten a revival with modern shops.
When we finally arrived at the pier, it was already too late and too dark to see much.
We decided to come again tomorrow to see it in the daylight.
For dinner, we went to the Liuhe night market that is located near our hotel.
We ate some local street food, as well as water chestnuts.
The Black shelled water chestnut grows in southern Taiwan, and are harvested during only two months per year.
On the outside, they look like tiny black bats, but inside they are delicious and taste like roasted chestnuts.
I have seen them sold in many markets and have occasionally seen street vendors selling them, but this was the first time I’ve tried them.
Despite being very tired by the time we returned to our hotel, I still went downstairs to do our laundry.
It was fortunate that our hotel had a laundry machine.
Overall, it was a very interesting day full of exciting art and sights.
With love,
Tali
Today’s Stats:
Steps - 25,658
Daily Distance - 17 km.
Total Distance To Date - 515 km
