Saturday, May 7th, 2011

Today, the community nurses took us to Kaohsiung that is about an hour southeast by train.  There was literally like 25 people that ended up traveling with us because all the nurses brought their friends and families. Not gonna lie, I was worried there was just going to be too many to make the day fun but it turned out to be really great! We got on a train at around noon and rode over to Kaohsiung. Here is one of the first signs we say when we got to the Kaohsiung train station J

The nurses set up a taxi ride for us that ended up being perfect! It was 300 NT Dollars per person but we had the taxi drivers to ourselves all day long and they would take us wherever we wanted to go that day. We were so hungry when we got into town so the nurses took us to a little “steam bun” place. The food was actually very good! I got soup with noodles and dumplings and others got the “steam buns” which are pretty much a bread-like pastry wrapped around some meat then steamed in a bamboo box for a while. They looked quite impressive when we walked up and see stacks and stacks of those boxes steaming all the buns.

Right next door to the steam bun place was an Abercrombie and Fitch so naturally we HAD to take a picture. The clothes were outrageously more expensive than the United States even! About $50 US Dollars for a plain t-shirt!

Next, the cab drivers drove us up to the university in Kaohsiung to see the amazing look-out over the entire city! There is a worship place up there for Buddhist monks (I think) so we went out and took pictures over the city and with the worship house.

 Our whole group: Kris (our instructor), Jocelyn, Sara, Jeni, Rachel, me, Alyssa, Kelsey, and Amber

 This is my cute nurse Ginger and her two kids, Peggy and Jimmy, and the head nurse, Chin Pan

2nd tallest building in Taiwan (behind Taipei 101 of course)

At the University by the worship center

All the nurses carry around umbrellas when it is hot because they don't want the sun to make their skin dark. Kelsey decided to do the same today.

 The nurses thought we were HILARIOUS for "meditating"

After this amazing view, we drove up to “Monkey Mountain”! This was probably the coolest ever! We walked up a mountain path straight into the “jungle” and once we got up pretty far, little monkeys just came out of nowhere!! They would just jump down from the trees and follow us up the paths through the mountains. We only wanted to see the monkeys so we stayed long enough to hang out with the monkeys then we headed back down for our next adventure.

 I-Chun

At the bottom of Monkey Mountain is a temple and I’m pretty sure it’s the first Buddhist temple we’ve been to. I think we finally figured out that all the other ones (the intricate, fancy ones) are all Taoist.

At that point we were insanely hot! We decided to go get our favorite: Tsua Bing!! J The nurses thought it would be a good idea to buy all of us nurses one big one to share! It was HUMUNGOUS!!

The Head nurse, Chin Pan, was SO nice and paid for our Tsua Bing.

Our next adventure was onto a ferry boat to the little town across the peninsula.

There is street market down the main road there so we shopped all the way down that then ended our trip at the beach at the end of the street! J It was so beautiful! The water was fairly warm and the night was perfect for the beach! We didn’t bring our swimsuits because our nurses said there is not swimming at the beach (I’m pretty sure they were kidding though) so we just played at the edge of the water and took a bunch of pictures! I-Chun (I-Jin) is one of the nurses from community that is fairly young in her unit. She hung out with us a lot that night and her and I really had a blast!

Once we were done on the island, we were SO tired and ready to go home but our nurses insisted that we make a stop at the “Love River”.  I guess Kaohsiung is famous for this little river. From what we read, the river used to be a dumping area for all natural waste (so basically sewage) so it made the town smell awful! They finally cleaned it up within the last few years and, since, it has become a beautiful attraction with boats floating the river and little shops along the side. We also finally took a group picture J

We were so tired at that point that we were ready to go home! The taxi took us back to the train station and we took the hour-long bus ride back to Tainan. It was about 11:30pm when we finally got home. I think that was the latest we’ve stayed out since we’ve gotten here!