After Taipei we had a debate on what to do next. Yanmei wanted to go to Alishan, a famous mountain park, but she also has a friend near Tainan she wanted to visit. Alishan is on the way to Tainan, but Yanmei found there is only one train going to the park at 9am, from Chayi, which itself is 2 hours from Taipei. We decided we didn't want to get up very early to try to catch that train. So we ended up just booking the high speed rail to Tainan.
This was my first time on a high speed train. What a great way to travel! Walk in and buy your ticket 10 minutes before departure from an automated kiosk, then board, find your seat and off you go. No security hassles or lines. The train left exactly on time. Smooth, quiet and comfortable.
The train got up to 275 km/h. It only took about 1 hour 40 minutes to get to Tainan. Unfortunately we found out the Tainan high speed rail station isn't really in Tainan. We had to transfer to a regular train and ride about 30 minutes to get there.
We got to our room, then went to a 7-Eleven to pick up some water. Yanmei still needs a hat ;).
Then Yanmei's old friend Yaya, who she met in the UK came over. They hadn't see each other for 7 years. Yaya gave Yanmei that brown bag in the picture 7 years ago and Yanmei still uses it every time she travels.
Yaya is a good host, she found a fancy vegetarian restaurant for us. Here is a night picture of Tainan while we were hailing a cab. The scooters are still omnipresent.
The restaurant was good, but it was more western style.
There was the appetizers, pictured above, then salad, the soup, then the entree, then a fruit juice, and finally dessert. All this worked out to about $14 USD per person. Not bad! In general food is cheap here. Most of our meals at small shops cost $3-4 USD for both of us. By the way, we'd heard that you don't need much cash in Taiwan because everyone takes credit cards, but we've found the opposite. We use cash for most things, all these little shops don't take credit cards, and even places that do it is often easier to just use cash.
After dinner we went back to our room to sleep. We planned on going to Alishan the next morning because it is much closer to Tainan than Taipei, then meeting Yaya again in the afternoon.
-David
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