Turtles!

I hope everyone’s having an excellent May long weekend. They don’t observe Victoria Day here unfortunately so it was back to the grind for us this morning! (Hah!)

Yesterday was spent largely on a visit to an apartment we found online. As I mentioned earlier this week, we’ve been looking for a place to live in June and July and an agreement has been reached on a gorgeous three bedroom apartment in the city! It’s right next to Kaohsiung’s only authentic American-style sandwich shop and deli (where you can buy regular non-sweetened bread and all kinds of fancy cheese!) and is near an awesome park.

The apartment is being rented to us by a UK citizen who married a local girl. He doesn’t currently live in Kaohsiung so the place was shown to us by his adorable Taiwanese mother-in-law who doesn’t speak a word of English! She waited outside the deli for us in a BRIGHT pink denim jacket, bright red dress slacks (very lucky), and a huge, pink tennis visor with rhinestones and butterflies all over it. So cute. She showed us the apartment while speaking Chinese very loudly hoping we’d understand at least part of it. Her adorable factor was off the charts, and I’m sure that influenced my half of the decision to live there more than anything else.

On our walk through the park back to the train station we were on a bridge crossing a pond when a whole group of turtles swam up! They were so friendly and were all craning their necks out of the water as though to catch a glimpse of us. As we walked on, more and more of them swam up near us and the whole cluster followed our progress along the bridge. There were even some tiny baby turtles! I’m in love with Taiwan.

Today we were FINALLY going to the Lotus pond with our little backpack and our sunglasses and our mosquito repellent. We took a ride on the subway to the northern part of the city, rode to the top of the escalator at the Zuoying train station and immediately turned back around and headed downstairs. Why? Because a rainstorm hit the island while we were underground on the subway. It was raining so hard. People were just standing under shelter staring at the rain like “What do we do now?”

Luckily Zuoying station is also where the High Speed Rail and regular train lines meet, so there’s tons of food and shopping! We had a quick lunch and wandered around some gift shops. There was plenty of carved sandalwood, cookies, and trinkets on display, and a whole booth full of Canadian ice wine! We were very proud.

I think I may have figured out how to post videos on here! Check out our new friends from yesterday (and me sounding like a giddy idiot all stoked on the turtles):