Kaohsiung City, Taiwan

Kaohsiung may be a bit of a big, ugly city in some places, but other places are quite nice...like this! It's certainly not as ugly as I expected, but the pollution is much worse than I expected. Steph and I were out driving for a while a couple of weeks ago, and when I got in the shower the water running down my skin was brown. Don't trust air you can see.

This should give you a pretty good idea of what Kaohsiung, Taiwan looks like. It's a lot of pavement, scooters, tall buildings, Mandarin signs that I can't read, and Chinese people.

The driving here is crazy. I've gotten used to it and I'm not nervous wreck anymore, but when I stop and think about how dangerous it is I usually get a little freaked out. People here just don't look. At all. I've had a couple of close calls because I've been putting far too much faith in the power of traffic lights. Take it from me; a green light in Taiwan does NOT ensure that you won't smoked by a scooter who should be stopped at a red. I wish I could capture the insanity of the roads in a picture, but it's something you have to experience to believe.

I almost got run over trying to take this picture. I failed to realize that the light had turned green and I just sat there taking the picture like an idiot tourist. You know how people in Canada mock Asian tourists? Yah, I'm definitely the one being mocked now.

I took this picture last weekend when Steph and I went on a 3 hour mission to find Mega, the big Western department store here. The place is absolutely enormous, and after we finally found it I couldn't believe that we had such difficulty. It's a giant, circular 17 story building that says MEGA in huge letters on the front. Very hard to miss.

Being in Mega was rather interesting. The Taiwanese definitely don't do video games like Canadians. They have some crazy dancing stuff that draws a huge crowd. It's absolutely hilarious to watch, which we did. And we laughed. A lot. After that we went to go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith...and listened to other movie-goers burp through the whole thing. Ahhh....the beauty of Taiwan.