2024 Bali to Tokyo -March 25th Kaohsiung, Taiwan

I have no idea how to pronounce that...Kaohsiung. Their language is so melodious. I have discovered why so many Asians cannot pronounce many of our words properly. They don't have some of our letters in their language. If you grew up your whole life and never learned to speak with the letter 'J" for example, how difficult would that be to speak it in another language? Probably impossible. Mystery solved!

We are greeted by a city that looks very clean and cared for with beautiful architecture. Our bus tour takes us to a bridge that they seen quite proud of.

What is very odd though is that the streets are practically empty of people. There are almost no pedestrians walking around and hardly any street traffic either. I question whether their government told everyone to stay indoors to avoid the tourists. I know that sounds crazy but I can't tell you how odd it felt here. We went to a park surrounding a lake that also contained a temple as well as an attraction where you walk in a dragons mouth and out the tigers mouth. It was under construction so we didn't visit.

I especially loved the turtles!

We found a little coffee shop. They were forward thinking enough to have menus that you could point to in English so that knew what you wanted.

We could probably tour the world and just focus on coffee shops and still find something interesting to say. This town is so particularly clean and organized that they even have these cute little cloth coasters in the cafe that someone painstakingly crafted for guest to feel welcome! I don't recall as ever having seen that back home?

ok, so take a minute to review all of this pictures. The only people you see here are our tour group at the central station for their underground trains. No Taiwan peoples. Weird, right? Zombie apocalypse or the rapture? Where are all the Taiwan people?

Overall, I probably wouldn't go back to this town as there was no human interaction and very little culture to be learned about as our bus driver really only wanted to talk about AI but never really said anything about it.

Beautiful, clean, boring! 

One last note thought. I probably mentioned how clean it was, right? Well, it was so clean that I actually tried to spot any litter on the road or anywhere for that matter and could find absolutely none! During the entire bus ride! That's a lot of ground to cover. I was able to spot one person though that was actually cleaning the street when I passed, and he was even cleaning up each and every leaf that had fallen from the trees. What if in America, we required everyone on public assistance that didn't have a job to actual work, even if that meant cleaning up the garbage and keeping our public spaces clean. We could learn something from other cultures, for sure!