Keelung, Taiwan

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So after my whirlwind tour of Taipei; which will be continued later, Amy and I headed out to Keelung. Keelung is a port city and it's a cheap hour train ride outside of Taipei. The college student at the Information Desk in Taipei booked us a room and then wrote down the address in chinese so that we could tell a taxi where we needed to go. Not speaking any Chinese was pretty difficult on this trip. I haven't been to a place where I didn't speak the language for a while now, so it was interesting and sometimes frustratingly funny to communicate.

As we arrived at our hotel we were pretty confident until we got to our room....our room with only 1 bed. Amy and I just shrugged and went with it, dumped out stuff and then set out to figure out where we were and what we needed to get done. We got a map and headed up to Jungjeng park; which ended up getting us a good urban hike in for the day because it consisted of a good couple hills to climb and some stairs. It was great fun to get up there though. We passed a karaoke party in the park on our way up to the Guanyin statue. The statue is beautiful and the area that surrounds it has a great view of the harbor and the giant Keelung sign, think the hollywood sign maybe on a smaller scale. There were cars you could ride in, a small cafe and souvenir shop. The view is the main reason to head there. There is a bus that goes there, but we are young and in good health so why not walk?

After our walk down we headed back to our hotel to shower, it was pretty hot, and then head out to the night market. The Keelung night market is really well organized and there are signs in English to let people know what is being sold there, but the people working the stall may not speak any English. Amy and I had that problem when we were looking around for dinner. Along with the food stalls there was this amazing tea that had fruit and honey in it. It was absolutely fantastic and Amy and I were sad to see the end of it when we left. We walked along the river and enjoyed the evening with lanterns and a little shopping to end our evening before we headed back to our hotel for the most uncomfortable nights sleep if the trip.

Let's just say the bed was a bit too hard for 2 people...and it was pretty cold in our room. I think we both had a bad nights sleep.

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