Hello Taiwan!!: Dear England... #2

Ed and I have come leaps and bounds since we first arrived here. Everyday our love for Kaohsiung grows. The more we explore the city, we discover little corners and streets that offer so much! We've met some amazing people as well. This has changed everything because it makes the city home.
We have done lots of stuff in the last couple of days! We went (not up... yet!!) to the 2nd tallest building in Kaohsiung. With my fear of heights, it's going to take a lot to get me up to the top! It is an 85 storey sky scraper - 378 m high!! And the lift takes you up 10 meters a second! Yes, it's going to take a lot of encouragement to get me up that thing! Poor Ed though, he's desperate for it!

But he'll just have to wait! We were meant to be meeting Lexus - a friend of friend who lives and works in the city, at the bottom of the building, but he never showed! After waiting for about half an hour we decided to have some food at this very cool restaurant with an astro-turf carpet and flip-up mirrors on every table! We both had pasta and it was delicious! Back to the hotel we rang Lexus. We were in fact meant to be meeting him at the Chang-Gu Worlds Trade Center... Ed had thought he wanted to meet us at the 2nd tallest building in Taiwan, but what he actually meant was the 2nd tallest building in Kaohsiung! Not a great start. But anyway, we finally met up with him and went back to his flat where we met his girlfriend Vanessa, housemate Pauline and friends Boyson (Dutch) and Danny (Colombian). They are awesome! They gave us fresh mango and peach as a snack. Yummy!

Vanessa, Lexus and Pauline (from L-R)

We hung out with these guys all night and checked out a club called Brickyard. But we didn't stay long for a few reasons... jet lag and the music. But we bought tickets for the following Sunday to see Skerrit Bwoy. Everyone was going so why not! We got an early nights sleep that night.

For lunch the next day, we decided to sample some of the food from 21'Mega Mall. I wasn't really that impressed. Maybe because I was expecting dim sum... which it wasn't! But also because it wasn't that tasty! Also, we over ordered...

After trying to finished off our vast feast where 'everything tasted of tea' (according to Ed), we headed off to Sizihwan beach. To get to the beach we had to walk through a long man made tunnel.

At the end of the tunnel lies the National Sun Yat-Sen University, which lead us to the beach. The beach was shut, but we managed to sneak on and dip our feet in the cooling South China sea. It was completely pitch black so I didn't manage to get any good photos. But I'm sure we'll go back! We went back to the hotel to get some money and then got back on the MRT to Formosa Boulevard to eat food at the Liuhe Night Market, where Ed (again) indulged in some squid, this time deep fried!

In my last blog I showed you the wonderful interior design of Formosa Boulevard (the largest glass work in the world), and the outside is just as good:

There are 4 of these glass structures which act as the entrances/exits for the station. They surround a giant cross-roads.

For lunch the next day (Monday) we ate Sushi! It was a restaurant recommended by our friend Eva, who is from the Sanduo area. It was delicious and very cheap. Costing us 330 twd which is £7!!! We got 10 plates of sushi! 7 of which were mine...

After sushi we jumped in a taxi to Brickyard for our second installment of Kaohsiung night life. And it was good. Skerrit Bwoy was headlining. Heard of him? He's a traditional Jamaican sound-system DJ who has toured with Diplo who says "We can count on him to get the people really crazy" Oh and he did! He mostly played moombahton (it's close to raggeaton but with a UK funky style beat) which I didn't really like. But the crowd certainly did! He would sometimes come to the front of the stage and dance around, inviting women onto the stage with him:

And boy. did they love it! It was amazing and hilarious! Skerrit Bwoy would throw these women around, up and down, side to side. It was quite the thing to watch! At the end of his set he through out some TUNES!! That's when it got really good. He played loads of classic hip hop - 2Pac, Busta Rhymes, oooooh it was good!