Fo Guang Shan

North and east of Kaohsiung is a huge Buddhist complex. It includes multiple temples as well as a monastery. For tourists there is a hotel, multiple vegetarian restaurants, gift shops, a calligraphy museum, art museum, and museums of Buddhist beliefs and history.  There is even a tooth relic that supposedly belonged to the original Buddha. The whole area is a beautifully landscaped garden. Margaret and I used one of the days when the kids were in school to go check it out. We had a great lunch at one of the vegetarian restaurants. If all vegetarian food was that good and that easy to find I might actually go vegetarian.  Then we walked around the grounds and explored the museums. There was a set of murals running along one wall of the compound illustrating various buddhist ideas. One showed a cow being lead away to a slaughter house with huge human style tears pouring out of its eyes. It was enough to make Margaret reconsider her love of hamburgers.

Wakeboarding at Lotus Lake

After last weekend's somewhat miserable trip to Taipei on the overnight bus we decided to stay home this weekend and do things in Kaohsiung instead.  Lotus lake is a reservoir on the north side of Kaohsiung. It is surrounded by a park and has multiple temples and pagodas built on piers on the lake.  You can rent a sailboat or pedal boats or paddle a dragon boat. The kids though were most interested in the wake boarding. One end of the lake is set up with a set of towers spread in a circle around the lake with a cable running continuously around the loop.  You can grab on to a handle and be pulled around the lake on a wakeboard. There are multiple jumps and other obstacles.  You have to do one lap on a knee board  and then you can graduate to a wakeboard.  Everyone seems to have figured it out pretty quick except for Syd who keeps crashing on the turns.

Overnight bus trip- big mistake

   This weekend we decided to take one of the overnight buses from Kaohsiung instead of the high speed trains. The HSR is amazing. It almost makes Kaohsiung which is on the southern end of Taiwan feel like a suburb of Taipei on the north end. You can get on in Kaohsiung and get off about 100 minutes later in Taipei. However, it costs about $100 round trip and it doesn't run from about 11pm until about 6am. So if you are trying to make a 6AM hockey practice in Taipei on Saturday morning it means you have to take the train up Friday evening, stay overnight in a hotel for about 6 hours, get up at around 5AM and take a cab to the rink. There are also overnight buses that run 24 hours a day to Taipei. We were told that they take about 5 hours and you sleep on the bus. So we thought this weekend we would come home from school, eat dinner, and rest a bit. Then head out for a bus that leaves just before midnight with plans to sleep all the way to Taipei and get in around 5AM and go straight to the rink. Bus fare is about half the train fare plus no hotel needed so it would be much less expensive and maybe even better...
    The buses themselves are pretty nice. Huge seat like in a first class cabin on a domestic flight. They even reclined a good bit although not flat. Unfortunately the drive time is quite a bit less in the middle of the night with no traffic and the driver just wants to get there as fast as he can so he can empty his bus and go home and go to bed. So, the drivers haul ass on what my guess is a mix of Sudafed, betel nut, and caffeine.  We arrived in Taipei around 3:30 AM. and were promptly kicked off the bus into a mostly empty bus station. No time to go to a hotel. Too early to go to the rink. Everyone exhausted.  We ended up all collapsed on benches in the terminal with our bags piled up around us. The kids tried to lie down with their heads in our laps and were told by a security guard that they couldn't lie down. So everyone just leaned against each other on the benches until we could go to the rink. This picture probably shows best how miserable it was. Won't be doing that again.

Just before security busted kids for lying down. Person in corner shows correct way to sleep in bus stations and would not be out of place even at the Port Authority terminal in New York

Exploring Cinjin Island

  As I said before the kids are pretty much fully booked during weekdays. They have no time or energy for anything else. Margaret and I on the other hand have very little in the way of requirements on our time from the point when the kids leave for school until they get back around dinner time. On March 7th we decided to go explore Cinjin Island. Cinjin is a barrier island marking the outside of Kaohsiung harbour. It has been occupied for centuries and has some of the oldest buildings in the area. You can take a 10 minute ferry ride from downtown across the harbour to Cinjin. Once there it is easy to get around with a bicycle.  The whole outside of the island is essentially beach and parks connected by bicycle paths.  We took the subway to the downtown area and rented a tandem bike for the day. Then loaded it on the ferry headed across. Once in Cinjin we road around the beaches which are black or dark gray sand. We also went to windmill park where people were also flying stunt kites. We finished at a huge open air seafood restaurant.  During peak periods the restaurant works like a buffet with the chefs putting all kinds of dishes up on the counter and people taking what they want. You pay by the dish. Dinner also comes with all you can eat fresh fruit, iced tea, and rice. We arrived after the peak period so we just ordered off the menu and had shrimp, abalone, ferns, and other vegetables but still with unlimited fresh fruit, tea, and rice. The lady running the restaurant thought we didn't take enough fruit so she sent us home with a bag with more fruit.

Windmill Park

Seafood restaurant in Cinjin

View back at Kaohsiung from Cinjin

Some random thoughts after the first week of school

The kids are very busy now with school. They get picked up at 7AM to go to school and don't typically get home before 6pm. Plus they usually have at least a bit of homework to do so it makes for very long days. They don't seem to have a ton of homework but it basically means there is very little free time for them during the week. So, sightseeing and other fun things will have to wait for the weekends.
  We have told the kids they have to come home with at least one good story every day. Here are two of the best from the first week. Nick was going down the stairs at school with one of his new friends when they ran into two school mates. One of them asked Nick's friend, "Is that your new American?" The friend said yes and the other kids pointed to his friend and said, "I'll trade you my Korean for him?" Then everyone laughed.  Piper had a friend ask her yesterday, "Can I push on your nose?" When Piper said yes she proceed to push on her nose to see how squishy it was. She was one of several people over the last few days who have commented on Piper and Rori's more prominent western noses.  Nick's classmates pretty much only use Mandarin with him and all of his classes except English, Design, and PE are in Mandarin. Syd and Piper's classmates use a mix of Mandarin and English although only one or two have English as good or better than Syd and Piper's Mandarin so when the going gets tough most of them revert to Mandarin. They have about 25% of their classes in English. So far physics in Chinese is a lost cause and math and biology are a real challenge. Still waiting for their first class of "Military Training"  The textbook has tanks on the cover!
  Although they don't have much free time the parents have lots of free time. We've been exploring the city and shopping and just relaxing. Last Friday we got our first exposure to Taiwanese health care. Taiwan went from a completely free market health care much like ours to national single payer about 20 years ago. Margaret has been struggling a bit with side effects of the exemestane she is taking to prevent recurrence of breast cancer. It causes joint and muscle pain and particularly severe tendonitis in her wrist. Symptoms got worse when we were in the really cold environment in Harbin. There was actually a recent controlled blinded study of acupuncture for treating this exact side effect that showed good results so Margaret thought she would give it a try while we were here. She sent an email to Kaohsiung Medical University asking if they had an acupuncture department. Very quickly she had a reply from a nice lady named Iris who was in the foreign outreach department and arranged her visit. We arrived on Friday morning and Iris met us at the front door of a big bustling medical center. It reminded us both very much of the busy New York city hospitals like Bellevue or Harlem  in the 90's. Big and crowded but with no frills.  Iris helped us navigate through the whole place and took care of all the paperwork. We passed by the waiting room for the ER and it was packed. There were about 8 windows open just for people to check into the ER.  We walked past a physical therapy department and it was a big open ward with about 20 tables with dozens of therapists working with about as many patients all in the same space. Every square foot of the place seemed to be being used with people right next to each other.  There were none of the fancy lobbies, or 3 story fireplaces, or grand piano's or beautiful food courts we have come to associate with all of our new hospitals in Denver. The acupuncture department had a waiting room with about 20 chairs, a few rooms for physician consultations, and a treatment room with about a dozen chairs and exam tables in a space the size of one our ED rooms.  When Taiwanese patients show up they insert their national ID into a card reader and when it is their turn their name shows up on a TV telling them where to go. No ward clerks, no triage nurses, just go where the TV tells you to go. Without a national ID we had to be led around by Iris. First Margaret met briefly with the doctor to talk about her history and current problems. That was about 5 minutes or maybe less. Then to the treatment room. At that point I was kicked out as there was really no space for anyone else. There was a bit more history and exam and then about 30 minutes of various treatments. These included traditional acupuncture, acupuncture with electrical stimulation of a few needles, some laser acupunture, and even moxibustion(google it) on one needle. When we were all done Iris took us back downstairs to some other department to pay our bill. It was about $28 for the whole thing.  We'll let you know if she feels any better but she thought the experience was dramatically different (and preferable) to the one treatment she had at home. There the whole thing was like going to a spa; aroma therapy, soft lights and music, robes, lots of relaxation exercises, a big upsell on a bottle of Chinese herbs and bill well over $100.  This was very utilitarian and to the point.
   Last Friday we took our first trip to Taipei so the kids could practice with the local expat ice hockey team.  We will be playing with them in a tournament in Hong Kong in a few months and probably another later this spring in Taipei so we wanted to have some practices with them but its not easy. There are only 3 ice rinks in all of Taiwan. There is one in Kaohsiung in a local mall which is about 50% the size of an NHL rink and shaped like a banana!

Drop in hockey at the banana shaped rink in Kaohsiung

 There is one in Tucheng which is about 60% of NHL size but at least a normal shape, and there is an olympic sized rink in Taipei.  That is it for all the figure skaters, hockey players, and speed skaters in the whole country so ice is in high demand. The kids' team has ice every Saturday morning at 6AM in Tucheng. So last Friday we took the high speed train from Kaohsiung to Tucheng in the Taipei suburbs at about 8pm.  A little after 10 pm we checked into the Norway Forest Villa  motel which is the closest place on Agoda to the rink. Turns out its part of this weird culture in Taiwan known as high end love motels.

https://blog.hotelquickly.com/taiwans-love-motel/

http://baldthoughts.boardingarea.com/2017/07/taiwan-love-motel-not-your-ordinary-motel-room/

Our room was the family room and came with two double beds, a bathroom that was easily 400 square feet, and was decorated in a jungle theme complete with a full size dugout jungle canoe in the bathroom! 

We had about 6 hours to sleep and then it was off to the rink. Practice was great. Over 90 minutes long with kids from age 6 to 16 all on the ice at once. There were two or three kids at the AA/AAA level including the goalie who was outstanding. The coaches were heavily involved in teaching and would stop drills at any time if there was something to teach. Very quickly they were showing Nick how to be more physical on the boards on defense in order to keep his man from skating away. Practice finished with a shoot out and even with each kid getting 2 or 3 tries only 2 kids managed to score on the goalie. After practice it was back to the hotel for breakfast where despite the love motel genre our fellow guests seemed pretty normal. Then it was the high speed train back to Kaohsiung where we got home by about 2pm or so. Next week we are going to try riding the overnight sleeper bus up to Taipei and going straight to the rink and then another bus back. Much, much cheaper than the high speed train/love motel combo and since we only got about 5 or 6 hours of sleep anyway its probably about the same. We'll try to go up as much as we can between now and the tournaments in April and May but its a long haul and expensive. Tomorrow we try the drop in hockey at the banana shaped rink.  Should be interesting in a rink where the two goalies can't even really see each other.

Boardwalk in front of house

  Our house has been fantastic. Its just what I would have wanted. Its right in a real community so we don't feel as much like tourists or expats. We walk to several local street markets to buy produce, tofu, and seafood. There are also great night markets for dinner close by. There is a river/canal with a board walk right in front of the house. There are several parks within walking distance. The subway, bike share stands, and the largest mall in Taiwan are all within walking distance.

The canal in front of our house. Our house is about halfway down on the left

View across the canal

First practice with International North Stars

Nick in a skating drill. He is #5

Nick and Piper after practice

Before school. Formal uniforms for Mondays. This is the big panoramic window in our living room.