Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Taiwan, Part 2

We just arrived at our hotel at Kaohsiung for the next two nights. The hotel is a bit dumpy and my room is really small. I couldn't find an Ethernet port in the room and I didn't see a business center in the lobby. To my surprise, they had an access point on each floor so I'm connected via WiFi. The room smells a bit like smoke but this hotel does not have a non-smoking floor... welcome to Asia.

We didn't see very much this morning. After breakfast at the hotel, we left at 9am for Kaohsiung. The main stop was at a small town where we walked around some alleyways. I think the town was famous for mung (green) bean cake. Lunch was at a random rest stop along National Highway #1; there is a parallel, newer, National Highway #3 that runs north-south along the west coast of Taiwan. It's 6pm local time now; I'm going downstairs to get something to eat.


View of Taichung from my hotel room


Sign pointing to a narrow alleyway (it says "touching breast lane")


Old houses away from the street. The tour guide said that some houses are 200-300 years old.


Making bicycle horns by hand (those axe-looking things are soldering irons)


Fruit stand along the street


Taiwanese shaved ice: red bean, pineapple, and aiyu (NT$20)


The two bags contain pig skin. The sign says they deep-fry pig skin, I guess to make pork rinds. Mmm... I think I'll pass.


View of Kaohsiung from my hotel room. Looks like any large city in Taiwan.

4 comments:

closetmusician said...

nice pics! are they all from your treo? the resolution is pretty impressive if it is.

"touching breast"...hahaha, too funny.

totochi said...

No, the pics are from my Sony DSC-W5 at 5.1 Mpix. The Treo is only 640x480.

BTW, my Treo is stuck in an endless loop where it resets itself over and over. Not as famous as the Blue Screen of Death but just as annoying.

closetmusician said...

infinite loop...maybe some intern didn't check their code before checking it in :) did you try hard reset?

totochi said...

I tried the normal reset plus a soft reset to no avail. A hard reset will wipe all my data so I'm waiting until I get back to the US.