Day 5: High Speed Rail trip to Tainan and meeting Amanda

This morning we slept in after our night market adventure that kept us out past midnight last night. It took a long time to organize our belongings and decide what stays in storage and what needs to go with us on the high speed train to Tainan. We took a taxi to the main train station, as it would be a pain to walk to the subway line with all our luggage. We had already purchased HSR tickets yesterday and went ahead to our gate to make sure that we could find it alright. They wouldn't let us into the gate area because we were too early. Only those with trains leaving in the next 30 minutes could enter the gated area. I found a spot to sit with all of our stuff while Kevin went up to level two and found us some lunch. He chose Burger King, as it's kinda hard for us to eat noodles with chop sticks and a spoon when we need to hurry up and get on a train. When entering the gated area, you put your ticket through a ticket reader, a lot like the ones at Walt Disney World. When the called for bording, we easily found car 4 and our reserved seats. One could purchase snacks and drinks on the HSR, and an attendant came by several times to collect our trash. Taking the train is so easy and you don't hare to worry about getting through security. I'd take a train like this instead of an airplane anyday! Kevin had his Garmin GPS out, and learned that we were travelings at speeds up to 180 miles per hour. Zoom! Once we arrived at the Tainan HSR station we followed the signs to the Taxi cab station. I handed a taxi card (piece of paper with the name and address of the hotel written in Mandarin Chinese that I had the front tesk staff made at our last stop) and we were on our way. I figure that it took 15-20 minutes to get to our hotel, the Tayih Landis.

We met up tonight Amanda, with a blogger that lives in Tainan. I'll post more later this weekend about that. When we were out and about tonight we went to Carrefour, which is some kind of a blend between Target and Wal-Mart. I really liked the sign in the first photo here, and took some photos with Kevin. We bought diapers, books in Mandarin and English for young children, and some snacks including our first taste of Taiwanese pineapple Yum!



Man... I wish we had some "stop crying toys" back at home in the US! (joke)


Here's Kevin with his prized Keyboard that has characters on it. He's been pumped about getting one of these for several weeks.


Ahhh... here's a stop crying toy, for real.