Taiwan - Kaohsiung, Another Morning

After Grandma's party, we went back to spend the night in Kaohsiung.

The next morning, here we are following my Mom as she's charging down allyways, with my Dad muttering, "Where are you going? We can't walk there."

Eventually, we take a taxi to the soy milk breakfast place.

Jumped in a taxi who had his own TV.

What really astonished me about Taiwan was the number of scooters. I guess I was still used to China traffic.

I wold say that cars make up 60% of the traffic and scooters the remaining 40%. My Dad and I agreed that since cars have been an achievable, personal goal for many, many years in Taiwan, they aren't as big of a "look at me" possession as they are in China. Thus, scooters are just fine for many people to get from point A to point B.


View from my aunt's spare apartment. Unfortunately, I would say the pollution was about 80% the "badness" of China.

After breakfast, we visited my Mom's sister. My Mom is the youngest of 6 girls. And after my Mom, there were three adopted girls, sorta (I'll go into that later).


If my Mom is the #6 sister, then the one above is the #4 sister. That's the one that gets along with my Mom the best. All the sisters love to tell each other off. Where my Dad's family is "cool blooded", her side is very "hot blooded". Two sisters (one of whom my Mom was close to) died of strokes - related in part to their temperament.

Anyway, my Aunt and I get along. She looks sooo much like my Mom it's weird (albeit many years older).

My aunt runs a Vespa parts store. In the "olden days", the only scooter in Taiwan was an Italian Vespa. And then in the 80's the Japanese models overran the world and people stop buying the expensive Vespa and now by the Japanese scooters. But my Aunt still sells the parts for Vespa.

I was feeling sorry for her, having the scooter world pass her by, but my Dad pointed out that she's doing very well. All over Taiwan, people who want original Vespa parts have to find my aunt and she ships parts throughout the country.

I was standing in a pivot taking pictures of her shop, when my Aunt asked me, "What are you doing? Why are you taking pictures of this mess!?!"

Ummmm, I'm....taking pictures for my blog memory. Then she started fretting about the mess and the piles. And then she resigned herself and said that, "What's the point. Whenever I talk about cleaning up, the rest of the family gets upset about how they cant find the parts once the place gets cleaned up."

But I had to take a picture of this nice, cherry Vespa they have there just for demonstration purposes. It's never driven, just sits there (sigh - I'd live to drive that sucker).

They kept talking about how much I looked like their father. I then mentioned that people kept saying that, but no one had ever showed me a picture. Then, they both talked about how their father hated more than anything to have his picture taken. Thus, they think that there is one picture of their father, buried somewhere in someone's album.

And then my Aunt asked if I'd seen pictures of her mother. I said I've seen one picture and she looks very angry.

Well, that did not sit well with her and she hopped off to go upstair to their house and grab a picture of her mother.



That's only the second picture I've ever seen of my Mom's mother. the first one she had an angry scowl. This is the only thing close to a smile I've ever seen.

And then it was off to see my Dad's #1 brother.



After Grandma's party, I mentioned to my Dad how little his brother talked and wondered if my Dad was close to him. My Dad said that in fact he and #1 brother were the closest to each other because they were very similar in temperament and age.

And later, #1 aunt took us and #1 uncle out to lunch and they did talk a lot. So, my #1 uncle just didn't like to talk much in crowds.

We visited them at their shop (which is behind me in the picture) and took picture of them with my aunt (who I don't know very well).

And then off to the train station. As we were walking past many, many food stalls I was thinking of the show "Bizzare Foods" and I had to snap this: