This past weekend, I traveled to Tainan with friends from work and other branches in the area. Tainan is known for its history, food, and the warmer weather in comparison to some of the more northern parts of Taiwan. Up until this past weekend, Taichung was actually the furthest south that I had been on the island.
Our day in Tainan started early with a visit to the Chimei museum. The Chimei museum is an entire building that holds various collections ranging from art work to musical instruments to exhibits about animals. The building is a new addition to the area, and the collections are rather old in comparison. A favourite room of mine was the room of statues, as well as the room of musical instruments that chronicled the transformation of instruments over the centuries. Music is and always will be one of my favourite things in the world.
After Chimei, we headed to our first restaurant. With a moving centrepiece, we were served traditional lunch and fed to our heart’s content. Our next stop was the Ten Drum Cultural Park. A sugarcane factory turned performance centre and cultural hub, a musical group called Ten Drum performs in one of the factories and preserves a historical part of Taiwanese history in terms of sugarcane production. Ten Drum has been nominated for a Grammy, you should check out their music! It was a thrilling performance, inspired by nature and performed only with drums and percussion instruments.
We got to try out our musical talents on the drums after watching the professionals perform! It took a little to get the rhythm down, but all in all it was cool to try it out for ourselves. Maybe a future career path? Join the Ten Drum performers, sign me up! Our time at the Ten Drum factory was over and we were onto our last stop before dinner, in the town of Chiayi. Chiayi sits between Taichung and Tainan a little further away from the coast than Tainan.
We went to a shopping centre that bore some resemblance to the scenery in some parts of Europe. It was more of a photo stop for my friends and I than anything, but we enjoyed the pit stop in our journey. As the sun went down, we piled onto the bus for our last stop: dinner. Arguably and agreed upon by most people I talked to, dinner was the best and most filling meal of the evening. We ate all that we could, but before we knew it, the day was coming to an end.
It was time for us to return home to Taichung. Our feet were tired, our minds restless, and our bellies full at the end of a long Sunday. My only wish after the long day in Tainan was to go back and see more sights, as we only were able to see very little of the area. Tainan is a place that will be on my list of towns to visit in Taiwan in the near future.
