We got us some tea drinking weather

Tea House

Taiwan is hot! Sweaty hot.  I hate to admit this because I like heat but I felt it totally necessary to just spend entire days drinking cold blended fruit beverages and Chinese teas from the tea houses perched on the hillsides overlooking the city.  One day, as I was meandering rather aimlessly, I came across a flight of stairs  400 tall.  I ascended because I had nothing else to do.  Lo and behold, there was a Buddhist tea house with flora and fauna and birds overlooking the city of Kaohsiung and it's massive harbor.  This felt nice because it was rather pleasant and quite relaxing for a hot October day.

We went surfing a few days before that.  Then I took a night train south along the east coast to Hualien where a few of us rented an economy car and drove it through the Taroko Gorge, an epic journey to middle earth.

Tainan is a favorite of mine and that's not just because I lay in the park drinking Bordeaux from the bottle and eating Beetlenuts.  As it is the oldest city in Taiwan, once a Dutch stronghold in the 1500's, it's filled with Taoist temples, it's the food capital of Taiwan, and it's small relative to Taipei, big to Maui.  Calm but buzzing, old but new, it is the perfect Asian city.  I rank it amongst my world wide favorites along with Chiang Mai, Kyoto, Barcelona, Paris, Miami, Tokyo and New York.  I may require some more time in it.