Here and there in Taiwan

Last weekend I attended Michael Klein's wedding in Kaohsiung. While we were waiting for the evening banquet to commence, my family and I took a stroll around the area, the Love River and the Ambassador Hotel.

An alley.

One view of a Kaohsiung avenue.

Same avenue. I liked them both so much, I kept 'em both.

Posing under the tree-shaded walkway.

An artist sketches the Love River scenery.

The Ambassador Hotel, reddish-brown in the center.

An artists club was hard at work along the waterfront.

In the background is one of the tallest buildings in the world.

The Kaohsiung Cinema Museum. Because when you utter the word cinema, the first place everyone thinks of is of course, Kaohsiung.....

Tour boats passing by the fish-dragon.

Kaohsiung and the Love River, by day.....

....and by night, a year apart.

A policeman conducts traffic in the early morning in Taichung.

Once it was a stream fierce in the rainy season and fecund in the dry.

A betel nut seller's shack.

Cleaning up cut grass on at the Foreign Ministry Offices in Taichung.

I haven't had a chance to shoot many bugs this year. They don't seem to be around as much as they were last year after the rain. This tiny bug completely defeated my camera.

....of course, I haven't had much chance to hike lately....

Perfect camo.

Enjoying a snack.

A funeral snarls traffic in a local suburb.

Traffic in Tali

A street in eastern Taichung.

A betel nut girl prepares the nuts.

An old man guards the entrance to a nursing home in Taichung.

My daughter's school, the smallest in Taichung county, faces the inevitable demographic crunch. Not enough children go to the school, and it is in constant danger of losing the subsidies necessary to keep extra staff and to keep class sizes small. Despite the budget crunch, nevertheless, it found money to erect a sign nearby to recruit students. This generated much anger among the local parents.

A copy of the petition being circulated on a referendum for the national property stolen by the KMT during the era of one-party rule. My wife picked this up at her landlord's, where we had a long discussion about the previous regime. Her father had been a government worker, and had remained in a low post his whole life, because he wouldn't join the KMT.

[Taiwan] [Kaohsiung]