Helen's Blog post 4

On our first day in Tainan after storing our luggage in the hotel we walked over to the National Cheng Kung University and got a tour of campus from local students. I found that the campus has a very East-Asian university vibe that I really like. It feels very comforting and nostalgic. I also like the style of the Japanese colonial barracks (sue me!). I still haven’t got the opportunity to ask if Cheng Kung Unversity is named after Zheng Chenggong (郑成功) so I looked it up and it is! I was a bit unsure because 成功 literally translates to “success” and National Success University is not a bad name on its own. Also thinking of the romanization of the name, it makes me think about how I don’t understand the romanization of Taiwanese place names at all. I feel like it is nearly impossible to guess what character or its actual meaning from how it is written in English or sometimes even how to pronounce it all. It was easy for most of Taipei (outside of the city name haha) especially in the metro stations but now in the south there is no rhyme or reason. I know historical romanization was all over the place (e.g. Peking vs Beijing) but now it is very standardized in places like Singapore or Mainland China. Because all of the place names I’ve seen are romanized from Mandarin (国语) I’m curious why they are not standardized as well? 


Linguistic tangent over, I’ve been having a great time in Tainan. I do think I like the vibe of the city way more and I think the food and shopping has been better! After our workshop and brainstorming I got dinner at a dumpling place and went to this classical Chinese inspired bar nearby. I got this absinthe based drink that they lit on fire! It was very fun and very delicious. I had a great time trying to decipher the meaning of all the complex Chinese-idiom (成语) based cocktail names with the help of Heather, who’s a local Taiwan student. It really reminded me that there's basically a whole level of Chinese language that I basically haven’t reached at all and it makes me excited to learn more.




The next day we went to a fabric market and walked around this popular shopping and food area. We got lunch at this trendy hole-in-wall pork sticky rice place and got very pretentious and expensive matcha after. Besides the matcha place, the area seemed very down-to-earth and somewhere where you can genuinely relax and have fun, with a healthy dose of trendy influencer nonsense of course! After walking around we went to this life-changingly good beef soup place (牛肉汤). I would say the name if I remembered it, but such a good day overall! 






Comments

  1. MeichunSeptember 5, 2026 at 4:17 AM

    Wow, you went to 萬昌起義! A very cool bar that has cool names for drinks. I want to see the picture of the "pretentious and expensive matcha"!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Taiwan Blog Post 1

Image
Arriving in the afternoon sleepy from my morning flight from Shanghai, and stepping off the train in Taipei Main Station my first impression was the palpable "vibe". At first, coming from Shanghai, the Japanese influence was unmistakable to me. Beyond the Japanese restaurants, import stores and gachapons there is a sense in the arrangement of the building that I can only attribute as coming from a Japanese influence. Honestly, I figured Taipei would seem like a bustling metropolis, but instead to me it almost feels cozy, especially visiting the old street DaDaoCheng. The rhythm of the signs, windows and ledges on buildings on the street create a feeling of entering consecutive rooms in a large but lively house. With the near constant rain it only increases the coziness. The two or three story houses with covered walkways past small businesses reminds me of the old Peranakan style houses in Singapore, complete with the “copy-baroque” embellishments. Moving to the cutting ed...
Read more

Helen's Blog 5

Image
These last few days in Tainan have been very eventful. On Saturday we did an indigo dying project. I thought it was so cool that the dye started out a muddy green color in the water basin and slowly turned deep blue when exposed to oxygen. I tried make my own design of folding it into triangles and securing it with popsicle sticks and I think it turned out decent although a bit different than I thought. (my design is fourth from the left in the image). We started the next day with a boat tour of a local wetland reservoir by Anping. It was a small lake with mangroves on the banks. There were some locals out fishing on bamboo rafts and we even got to try casting some nets ourselves. We didn’t see much fish but we did catch a surprising amount of jellyfish. Our tour guide even let us touch one. It felt just like jello! In the afternoon after the boat tour we toured the nearby city of Anping, where the original Dutch fort was located. All we saw that was left of it from the original 17th c...
Read more

Helen's Blog 3

Image
On my last day before leaving Taipei I wanted to visit the trendy Zhongshan neighborhood. We first went to this quirky design store called Par Store. I really like this type of place with lots of weird stickers, posters, and t-shirts. I try to go to at least one of this type of store everytime I’m in a new city, its a great place to find unique gifts from local artists. I found that while the Zhongshan area was well maintained, it was not particularly unique and quite similar to other trendy-type neighborhoods in Singapore and Shanghai. I found the trendy clothing stores to be particularly disappointing since they all sold the same boring, cheap and overpriced items. However I did stumble across a store that sold cartoon IP goods and I was surprised to find that their most recent item was a collab with the Alice and Wonderland cartoon and they had decided to highlight the baby oysters from the very beginning of the cartoon. They are basically unknown in the US and I would’ve never seen...
Read more