Tainan

Ash and paper fragments swirled across the road, catching in our clothes and hair, a heat haze rising as we cycled past roadside shrines, their fires ablaze. Its 'Ghost Month' in Taiwan, and Taoist temples across the southern city of Tainan are stocked with symbolic paper money to feed the furnaces, appeasing the dead and obscuring the paths between worlds. So to celebrate Ghost Month in our own way, we did what any responsible tourists would do on our first night, and went out to discover some Taiwanese spirits in the city's cocktail bars! 🥴

Tainan was the first place where Chinese and later European settlers landed on Taiwan. In fact, the term ‘Taiouan’ came to represent the entire island, and cities are designated by their compass location; Taipei is north, Tainan is south, Taitung is east, etc. Hence place names sound very similar! As the oldest ‘settled’ city Tainan was the capital for around 260 years, a key trading port for the Dutch, British, and later the Japanese, and is still considered the cultural and culinary heart of the country.

Day two, having banished the ghosts of drinks past, we zipped around the city centre on YouBikes. Cycling showed off Tainan's Japanese colonial past and the ancient markets. We also went to see the Shinto shrine on the roof of the art deco Hayashi Department Store, and the Tainan Art Museum, designed by the same architect.

Tainan doesn't have too many high rises, with most buildings no higher than ~6 storeys, covered galleries along the pavements, and plenty of open green areas, which we really love. The Art Museum had a triennial exhibition on architecture and urban design, and so we have both naturally been googling how long it takes to retrain as urban planners when we get back to the UK.

Day three, we had a more relaxed day in the Anping neighborhood, where the original Dutch fort and colony were established. One of the main landmarks here is an old colonial shipping warehouse which has become overgrown with strangler fig trees since it was abandoned 100 years ago. We also explored the Anping Fort, before walking in a circle around the backstreets. Chelsea remarked on a beautiful old colonial building... only for Dan to point out that it was the fort that we had visited 90 minutes earlier 🥲 In the evening we visited Shennong St for some vintage shopping, and found a craft beer pub in a bare concrete room, which you could only enter by swinging open an entire wall of the building 😮 We also had dinner at a self-proclaimed 'Authentic Japanese restaurant', where a man from Hong Kong (who didn't speak any Japanese) served us the only properly spicy Taiwanese food we’ve had here 🤡. Only very old people speak Japanese in Taiwan nowadays so Dan has been causing offence when checking if Japanese is welcome, assuming people are either: geriatrics, or colonists.

On our last morning before catching the high-speed train back to Taipei, we visited the Chimei Museum. This is an enormous building inspired by renaissance palaces, which looks like the White House and is home to an astonishing collection of European art and antiques. It has a natural history wing with taxidermied elephants and giraffes, Greek marble statues in the grounds, a hall of medieval weaponry from around the world, one of the world's best collections of antique violins, and artworks by Picasso, Dali, Chagall, Rodin, etc. It's like someone shaved off a chunk of the British Museum and plonked it half an hour outside the city centre in rural Taiwan. Completely bizarre.

In conclusion, we had an amazing time in Tainan. We love the atmosphere, the environment, and the culture and silliness of it. (In the spirit of silliness, swipe to the last pic for an Easter egg...)Baca lagi