Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Building in Weiwuying Art Village
Our impressions of Kaohsiung
Manufacturing/port city of the future: Kaohsiung is the largest port city in Taiwan and has done a fantastic job reinvigorating its harbor, amongst other areas, into a community space rather than one solely focused on shipping. Walking along the water, we felt that Kaohsiung embodied what any port or manufacturing city of the future should look like with creatively designed buildings, revamped shipping warehouses that now operate as markets and stores, and even a rotating bridge that connects two parts of the harbor
Art on every corner: We had so much fun in Kaohsiung in part due to its artistic and playful nature for residents and tourists of all ages. The city and its artists have turned every imaginable space into art, which had us wondering why other cities wouldn’t do the same. From street art on the harbor to sculptures and light up signs in the park to Weiwuying Art Village, an entire residential art that’s an open air museum, Kaohsiung is the most creative city that we’ve visited
Easy to navigate: We covered a lot of ground during our two days in Kaohsiung and spent a fair amount of time traveling from place to place. It was a seamless and pleasant city to get around with plenty of places to walk (our favorite was along the water) and top notch public bus and train infrastructure. Like the rest of Taiwan, Kaohsiung is an extremely safe city, so we enjoyed walking around at night without having to think too hard about where we were going
What we saw in Kaohsiung
Pier 2 Art Center: After checking into our new digs, our only plan for the afternoon was to explore Pier 2 Art Center along the harbor – a collection of warehouses that have been repurposed into boutiques, restaurants, and community spaces. We stumbled upon a hip market on our walk there, full of vendors with creative knick knacks and food trucks reminiscent of the ones you would find in an American city (sandwiches, burgers, even tacos). We opted for a radish pancake snack at a family-run truck and ate it while checking out interesting art installations in the adjacent park. With satiated stomachs, we continued to stroll around the area, remarking on all of the awesome stores and discussing what home goods, clothes, and other things we might consider buying if we lived in Taiwan or were headed back home sooner. We loved roaming around here – it felt unlike any other area we’ve been in Taiwan or elsewhere
VR Movie (Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under the Rubble): While window shopping at the warehouses, we came across a theater that offered VR movies. We were interested in the VR movie concept and, upon seeing a few movies that intrigued us, we made plans to come back for a showing of Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under the Rubble. Not only was seeing a movie via VR a neat experience, but the short film was also powerfully enhanced by the technology. The movie was about the experience of Genelle Guzman-Macmillian – the last survivor to be pulled from the rubble of 9/11. Through VR goggles, we were transported to New York on September 11, 2001 and felt as though we could see all of the chaos and tragedy that ensued. It was harrowing to watch, but we were inspired by Genelle’s story and her optimism as a result of the tragedy she endured amongst so many others
Arcade: We’ve now been to our fair share of arcades in Taiwan, but our experience in Kaohsiung was particularly memorable. On the way to the night market, we popped into an arcade that was packed and looked fun. We played a round of air hockey that Jessie was dominating in until the machine decided to spit out 10 pucks at a time, flustering Jessie and resulting in her demise. After the game was over, Jessie went to grab the rest of our tokens only to realize that they weren’t there. We looked all over, under, and around the table and couldn’t find the tokens… What we did see was a mischievous little girl, carefully watching us search for the tokens, whispering something to her sister, and proceeding to put several tokens into a game. SMH
Dome of Light: The Dome of Light, the world’s largest public art installation made from individual pieces of stained glass, was on the way home, so we stopped on our way back from the night market. At first we couldn’t find it, but quickly realized that it was underneath us. We took a few escalators down and arrived at the Dome of Light, conveniently situated in Formosa station (see, art everywhere!) The interesting part of the Dome of Light is the trippy, for lack of better word, designs in stained glass. Unfortunately, we arrived in the middle of a light show in the area around the dome where the floor was being lit up in interesting patterns, but the dome was totally dark. We figured we would wait around a few minutes and the show would end. We waited for about 20 minutes for the show to end and then another 10 minutes until the dome was finally restored to its normal state. It was worth the wait!
Rubber chicken claw machine: We had not yet had success with the claw machines we tried in Taiwan (they’re everywhere). When we saw a machine that had rubber chickens, we had to go for it. After Jessie loosened a chicken up, Doug made the impressive maneuver of rolling one of the chickens over the others and into the victory slot. Hazah! When we retrieved the chicken, we learned that if you squeezed it the right way, it gave birth to an egg. We excitedly carried around the chicken for the rest of the day, showing it to anyone that looked our way (people probably thought we were very odd)
Lotus Pond and surrounding temples (Tiger and Dragon Pagoda, Zuoying Tzu Chi, Chi Ming Tang): On our second day in Kaohsiung, we spent most of our time walking around Lotus Pond and the temples that line its shore. The first thing that we saw when we approached the pond was not a temple, but a wakeboarding adventure park. If we had been wearing our swimsuits, we most definitely would have partook – it looked sweet. After Doug peeled us away from watching the wakeboarders, we walked a bit farther to the Tiger and Dragon Pagoda. At first glance, the entrance to the pagoda looked like a fantasy-themed slide from an amusement park, but nope, just another interesting Taiwanese temple. We walked through the mouth of the dragon and out the mouth of the tiger for good luck and remarked on the detailed scenes of hell inside the dragon – yikes. We continued to walk and temple hop along the pond, stopping into Zuoying Tzu Chi Palace, a three-floor temple with a koi pond in its interior, the Spring and Autumn Pavilion, a peaceful gazebo-like structure where we bought a fortune out of a vending machine, and Chi Ming Tang, a colorful, gold-laden temple with red lanterns. Our last stop of our self-guided temple tour was the tallest waterfront statue in Southeast Asia (pretty grand claim to fame) where we tossed a few coins into two different cauldrons that represented our wishes for the future. We would write out what they said, but then they probably wouldn’t come true 🙂
Weiwuying Art Village: Our favorite place in Kaohsiung was a street art project in a quiet residential area where most of the buildings have been made into art, known as the Weiwuying Art Village. We spent an hour walking the streets of Weiwuying, mostly alone outside of the occasional resident (it’s a wonder Instagrammers from all of the world have yet to find this place). Each residential building was painted in a unique way by a different artist that had been invited to participate in the street art project over the years. Some of our favorites included buildings painted like fish, and particularly one street where four buildings in a row were painted with different color koi, funny heads, a woman reading a book, and New Taiwan Dollar bills that were incredibly detailed and realistic
Movie night: Our accommodation in Kaohsiung was set up for movie nights with a huge protector screen that came down in front of the bed to cover the city view. To make it a true Blockbuster night, we bought American-style snacks from the 711 in the lobby of the building including spicy Doritos, Cheetos, and these chocolate koala bear things. We scrolled to Knives Out, set up our snacks, and kicked back on the couch (a real luxury for us these days) for an entertaining night
Where we ate and drank
Caizong Li: Taiwan is home to many Michelin-starred restaurants and, though we didn’t eat at any with a Michelin star, we kept our eyes out for places with the Bib Gourmand distinction. Caizong Li was one of those places – a completely unassuming cafeteria with an old crowd (average age was 70) that offers a delicious miso soup and vegetarian zongzi (traditional sticky rice in the form of a cone) with boiled peanuts. The highlight was undeniably the miso soup with a generous soup to kelp ratio, while the lowlight was the tea – it tasted like watery coffee grounds
Liouhe Night Market: One of our only night market misadventures was at Liouhe. A man throwing fireballs marked the entrance to the night market, a unique and promising sign, but things went downhill from there. After pacing up and down the street, we noticed many of the typical Taiwanese night market stalls, but we were eager to try something new. An older couple was offering eel noodles – a unique dish – so we settled on those. It was one of the only dishes that we’ve tried in our travels that we couldn’t bring ourselves to make much of a dent in. The eel was slimy and fishy (nothing like Japanese unagi which is one of Doug’s favorites) and the noodles were coated in a rather gelatinous sauce. We ate what we could, said “xie, xie” to the lovely couple, and beelined to a bubble tea spot to get the eel taste out of our mouths. Our faces still contort at the memory of eating that eel
Hai Lai Vegetarian: Quite the contrast to the previous night’s dinner, we had a delicious lunch at Hai Lai Vegetarian – a busy vegetarian dim sum place in an upscale mall (mall restaurants are cool in Taiwan). We feasted on oolong tea, mapo tofu, dan dan noodles, vegetable dumplings on lotus root, bok choy dumplings, and chili wantons, each dish more delicious than the next. We (inappropriately) played a game of Yahtzee while we savored the last part of our dim sum and sent dice flying across the quiet, classy room on a few occasions, whoops!
Zhangmen Brewery: On our second night in Kaohsiung, we made our way back to the waterfront and stumbled upon Warehouse No. 2 which had a bunch of awesome-looking spots, including this Taipei-based brewery. Not only was it the perfect place to play a few rounds of Yahtzee (we are officially addicted), but Zhangmen also offered unique beers. Our favorite was the plum beer, based on plum wine which is a popular alcohol in Taiwan
Lingya Night Market: Night markets take a few flavors in Taiwan – pedestrian street, parking lot, and normal street with traffic. This night market, which was right next to our place, was the latter, full of people on motorbikes picking up dinner as they headed home for the night. Doug had braised pork rice here, one of his favorite Taiwanese dishes, while Jessie opted for a vegetarian stand, picking out five spice tofu and bamboo shoots
Where we stayed
Sam’s House: Definitely our favorite accommodation in Taiwan, Sam’s House was a managed apartment (we think they had two apartments) situated in one of the taller buildings in Kaohsiung. The set up was strange at first – lobby on the 12th floor, “VIP” lounge in the lobby with tea, cookies, water and laundry, and apartment on the 23rd floor – but the apartment was awesome and we were able to do our laundry for free which was a big bonus. Our favorite part of the apartment, outside of the great city view, was how perfectly set up it was for movies with a huge projector screen in front of the bed, another big screen in front of a couch, and yet another off to the side. We would have happily stayed for longer than two nights
