Plans Interrupted (part I)

Well, as I'd mentioned, last weekend was rather interesting. YT and I left last Friday for Tainan in the south to visit some friends and look aroud. We took the train, and it took us about four hours to get there. Our friend picked us up, then we went to the 17th century Confucian Temple, then another friend (and one of her friends) came to meet us for dinner. Tainan is famous for it's xiao chi [小吃] which is in essence similar (in size/function but not in taste) to Spanish tapas, and that's pretty much what we had to eat. Then we went to a night market to walk around (though it was packed), then drove out to the seashore to sit for a while. The next day we saw a lot of other things, including what had been Fort Zeelandia and Fort Provincia when Taiwan was a Dutch colony in the early and mid-17th century, and ate more xiao chi. This pic was taken at a place that makes tea out of dong gua [冬瓜], or winter melon. Not sure about the details : ) There are more pictures on my smugmug site here.

We had also received a phone call from Mom Friday evening that YT's mother's (biological) father was in deteriorating condition and was being taken to the hospital. He was 98, and had been ill for a very long time and was on a feeding tube, so this did not come as a great shock. Saturday morning we got another call that he was coming home from the hospital. This was actually foreboding news, because people here prefer their loved ones to pass away at home with family when possible. He did, in fact, pass away later that morning.

Although we had planned to go back to Taibei on Sunday, we decided to head back Saturday afternoon instead. We took the new high-speed railway back, which, as the name suggests, is pretty fast. It's elevated, based on a Japanese design, and was built to compete with cross-island air travel. It took us 1 1/2 hours to get back.

Well, there is more to say, obviously, which I believe I will leave to a future post for sake of thematics and length of posts. Till soon, BB