Weekend in Kaohsiung

1-29-13 Tues.

      We just got back from Kaohsiung. We stayed at the Harmony Hotel in the Lingya District a few blocks from the Love River. We didn’t take any taxis during the entire trip to or in Kaohsiung. We walked to the Taiwan Railroad ten minutes from our condo, took the train at Tai-Yuan Station about fifteen minutes to the New Wu-Rih Station (18NT; 62 cents us) to get the HSR fifty-eight minutes to Zuoying Station (720NT; $24.83us) and took the Kaohsiung (30NT; $1.03us) subway seven stops, about fifteen minutes, to the Central Park station, then walked fifteen minutes to our hotel. The complete travel time, door to door, was one hour thirteen minutes, not counting waiting time for trains. Coming home it was sixteen minutes faster because we had a non-stop HSR train home. The total trip was 768NT ($26.48us) per person, each way, 284 kilometers (176 miles) about the distance from New York City to Baltimore or Albany. It is much faster, inexpensive, and more comfortable. Of course, the high speed rail goes 135mph. The new hotel was 1,680NT ($58us) a night with free complete breakfast.

What did we do in Kaohsiung for two days and nights? We arrived at the hotel at 3pm and went out to the Hanshin Department Store across the street from the hotel. Leona bought some blouses and we went to the food court in the basement to have iced-tea and Mister Donut donuts. We then crossed the street back to the hotel to rest before we went out for the evening. We took a lovely walk along the Love River to the Kaohsiung Museum of History, an historical place itself; the former city hall, built by the colonial Japanese and where many Taiwanese intellectuals were murdered by the KMT in the 228 incident of 1947. The twenty-foot wide cobbled promenade, with a bike path along the 200 foot wide river is lovely at night with very few people, pretty lights reflecting off the water, and the sound of an er-hu in the air. We strolled along for fifteen minutes to visit the Museum but the museum was closed early that Sunday evening. Instead, we walked another fifteen minutes to Liouhe Tourist Night Market. The name warned us. It was going to be crowded with tourists, mostly from China. The rude tour groups were worth navigating through as Leona and I sampled all kinds of fried shrimp, scallops, oysters, soft shell crabs and mushrooms. We brought it back to the hotel to snack on but I couldn’t help sampling some along the way. I washed it down with fresh pressed sugarcane juice. Before we knew it, it the evening was over and we were ready for bed.

      The second day there began with a complimentary breakfast in the hotel basement. We had scrambled eggs, bacon wrapped hot dogs, toast, fresh coffee and orangeade. We then walked back to the subway to take the longer of two new routes to the end of the line, passed the beautiful steel snake-shaped World Games Stadium to the Ciaotou Sugar Refinery.

 Built in 1901 and closed recently, the Ciaotou Sugar Refinery was one of thirty-four sugar refineries in Taiwan bombed by the United States to stop the Japanese production of the main Taiwan export, sugar, and the sugar alcohol used to replace petroleum for their war machine. The slave labor of colonial Japan became the wage slaves of the KMT and the friendly fascist American friends exploited the resources, and polluted the landscape with belching stinking fumes of the refinery. We walked the grounds with workshops and the sugarcane railroad tracks and engines, mansions of management and the behemoth factory itself, now abandoned, in disrepair even to tourists. The dozen remaining bomb shelters were there to protect the Japanese exploiters and their families, not the laborers, thousands who died by machinery, bombing raids, or heart and pestilence in the baking plantation. The KMT didn’t lose a beat, appropriating the grounds for their own luxury and exploiting the Taiwanese whose land they redistributed to their own new Chinese oppressors. Leona and I spent the day there, a good six hours, before we hopped back on the beautiful new subway train for the ride back to Central Park and our hotel. We stopped in to a noodle place across the street for a snack and then rested up before the evening fun.

The evening started out walking ten minutes from the hotel past the Hanshin Department Store up a bohemian side street of coffee shops and boutiques mixed with mundane motorcycle repair shops and such to New Jyuejiang Shopping Area. It’s the area where teenagers go to alleyways with fashionable vendors, food and entertainment. That’s where Leona and I got some gifts for Simone and Renna, including a traditional red Manchu New Year jacket for Honey, the dog. We strolled around until we were tired and then walked a few blocks to T.G.I. Friday’s for a taste of home at an American food franchise. Every once in a while, we feel like having a hamburger or a mixed alcoholic drink , and this was one of those rare occasions for us in Taiwan. We had nachos cheese, Jack Daniels sauce-drenched pork ribs and mushroom pasta bow ties in cream sauce. I topped it off with a bottle of Taiwan beer. The restaurant is on a wide intersection overlooking the L.E.D. lit fronts of TALEES Department Store and Star Place. It was hard to believe we were in Taiwan with the wide boulevards and sidewalks with no traffic at all! Kaohsiung is different like that in Taiwan. If not for the worst air pollution and hottest heat on the island, we would be moving down here. We walked the few uncluttered streets back to our hotel room for the night.

Today was our last day in Kaohsiung. We left the city to return to Taichung on a 2:30pm HSR train. But, in the morning, we weren’t finished with Kaohsiung, yet. It started out, like the day before, with a complimentary breakfast at the hotel. Then we walked back along the Love River to the history museum in the old city hall. There, we went to see a fantastic exhibit honoring the Taiwan music industry of the 50’s and 60’s. The exhibit, with hardly any other visitors but us, was on the second floor of the beautiful building luckily not bombed by America or destroyed in hatred by the Chinese KMT invaders after the war. It was their city hall until they decided to expand, modernize and move out, leaving it to the historical society. It’s the same way they treated the Taiwanese music and musicians, James Soong in effect banning Taiwanese music from the FM airwaves in the KMT Sinification of the island. They had burned and destroyed all the Japanese recorded records of music of Taiwanese folk songs of the colonial period and now it was the Chinese turn to destroy the sad Taiwanese ballads of great singers and musicians of their era of oppression. By public performance in areas south of Taipei where good Chinese rarely ventured, the music lived on in street markets and through the static of weak AM radio signals into every Taiwanese home. In this exhibition, they had collected hundred of albums and album covers of the stars of the Taiwanese people, with their sad songs of parting at railroad stations and hardships of their lives as second class citizens in their own homeland, again. The music lives on in the neo-liberal post-Marshall Law period of make-believe freedom and two part ‘democracy.’ There is nothing the Chinese oppressors can do about it, especially in an independence friendly town like Kaohsiung. So Leona and I sat and chatted with a young curator who reminded us how many Taiwanese were massacred right in this building where the beauty and heart-felt spirit of Taiwanese commoners lives on through their music, once burned, once banned, and now just kept low-profile off the corporate Mainland Chinese owned and influenced TV media empires.

And that was the end of our wonderful visit to Kaohsiung. The city takes as long to get to as a trip from Brooklyn to Flushing by subway. We’ll be back before long.