One of the most awesome and bizarre experience I had in Taiwan was attending the Mega Port Festival in Kaohsiung. The two day festival featured mostly local bands with a few exceptions.
With five stages and no information or way of even googling the bands I was listening to I basically ended up having music ADD. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Even though a US band called "How to Dress Well" played at the festival, my favorite band of the day turned out to be a Taiwanese band called 宇宙人 (The Astronauts).
Here is the song in its entirety:
Here are some other photos and bands from the day:
How to Dress Well at Mega Port. They didn't sound that good. I think they had to rush their sound check.
Here is another session from KEXP where they sound much better:
After our day in Tainan, brother and I hopped on a train south. We arrived to 84 degrees and sunny weather. This ended up being the only day it was nice and warm out! Thanks for lying iPhone weather!
We checked into our hostel, Cozy Planet, which was super clean and conveniently located. The guy at the hostel told us about Foguangshan, a Buddha sanctuary, so we decided to hop on a bus and head out there.
While on our way, we ended up passing through E-DA, an Asian theme park that reminded me of Vegas. It was very creepy and packed with tourists. The bus that we were riding actually was sponsored by the theme park and played a promotional video along with a cartoon featuring characters from the park. The cartoon was a disturbing rendition of the classic Troy and the wooden horse. Basically the army inside the horse owas replaced with a rhinoceros, donkey, fairy and baby. The series of cartoons simply show these characters pooping and farting their way out of the horse. Great retelling
of history!
Sorry for the quick detour. This part of the adventure was disturbing enough that it had to be captured on the blog. Now back to the regularly scheduled program: Buddha.
The next morning, we woke up to have breakfast at this fine establishment. The food was delicious and so I had to snap a quick pic of the place.
In the afternoon, Kenny and I checked into the Grand Hi Hotel for our annual lux birthday celebration. For those that don't know, last year while traveling in Vietnam, Kenny and I started the tradition of staying at a luxury hotel for one night only during our travels together. We stay take advantage of the warm showers, clean linens and most importantly, the bathrobes! This year the hotel didn't quite live up to the hotel in Vietnam but Kenny and I definitely enjoyed our stay!
We had a nice view from our room:
Kenny's favorite part by far was bath tube time. He even decided to do his very own impression of George Washington for me, which you can see below:
When we arrived in Tainan, we had to take a shuttle from the HSR station into town. I stepped on to the bus while my brother spoke with the driver. An older gentlemen in the back of the bus ushered me to a couple seats next to him. He spoke very broken English so I'm not really sure what he was trying to tell me.
Fortunately, my brother came over only a few seconds later. When Kenny began speaking Mandarin, the man's jaw dropped and it took him a second to get back in the conversation. From that moment on he did not let Kenny do anything else but talk to him.
He asked where we were going and what we were doing in Tainan. When we told him we were there visiting, he insisted on giving is a ride to our hostel and taking us around the city the next day.
With Kenny sick at home, I decided to test out my directional skills in Taipei. I looked up Elephant Mountain directions, which looked pretty straight-forward, and made my way from the hostel to the MRT (subway).
The directions, while I took a much easier route back, were spot on and I made it to the bottom of the hike in no time. The hike was pretty short and effortless (although I sound like I'm super winded in the video) and definitely a lot better than paying $20 to go up in Taipei 101.
I woke up Monday morning to an email from Kenny saying he had been sick all night, was not going to school that day and probably wouldn't be able to hang out that evening.
Fortunately, I had already planned to meet up with a Couchsurfer that morning and was staying at a hostel with a number of other people my age who I could hang out with later that evening.
Xavier, the Couchsurfer, meet me for coffee at Wilbeck's, a coffee shop close to my hostel and the MRT stop, Guting. After chatting a bit about life in Taiwan, the legalization of marijuana in Washington state and his favorite pop music, we decided to go get some breakfast. It was far enough away that he took me there on his moped. Riding through the busy city was a lot of fun especially looking as cool as I did.
Kenny still felt pretty bad that evening so I stuck around the hostel for a particularly intense game of Apples to Apples later that evening.
A day after our hot spring adventure, Kenny, myself and Kenny's good friend from Taiwan, Karen, headed east to celebrate the final day of the New Year celebrations!
We were not quite sure what to expect and took off on the MRT (subway) around 1pm. From the MRT, it took another hour on the bus to get all the way out to Pingxi.
I was surprised when we finally hopped off the bus. I wasn't sure at that time how many people would be at the festival but from the looks of things, this town was not very big and already crowded.
One by one, lanterns floated up into the sky. We saw people all over the tiny town painting words onto their lanterns. Karen told us that the words were wishes for the new year. We bought a lantern and began writing wishes for ourselves.
As the sunset, everyone began migrating over to the main stage that was not initially visible when we arrived. Once it was dark the true ceremony began. There was music and then all of a sudden all the lights went out and they released hundreds of white lanterns.
The sight of these delicate white lanterns floating up into the night sky was breathtaking. Truly something special.
After the ceremony, we made our way back to the city center for some food. Seeing all of the people, we thought it would be a good idea to let some of them leave before going back to the bus line. We were wrong. The line for the buses was the longest line I've ever seen. We waited in it for almost an hour.
As we waited in line, watching the steady stream of buses file through the city, Kenny and I tried to calculate how many buses were in service specifically for the festival. Later we asked the bus driver and found out our guess was pretty close. Roughly 500 buses were shuttling people out of the town. With about 50 people crammed into each bus, we estimated that at least 25,000 people had attended the evening events. That's a lot of people!
