Exactly one year ago, I spent my first Christmas in Taiwan. This year, I decided to do the same. This time, I explored a bit of southern Taiwan in the city of Kaohsiung before ending my trip in Taipei.

Although Taiwan is a rather small piece of land, like North and South Korea, the weather is actually quite different. In the southern part of Taiwan, the weather was warmer with less moisture. My first outing in Kaohsiung was to the tourist hotspot of Lotus Pond. This is where there are a few pagodas, as well as pavilions and temples scattered around the pond. The biggest pagodas are ones with a tiger and dragon’s mouth as the entrance and exit. They overlook the pond and surrounding area. Apparently, the artwork inside and around the pagodas represents the eighteen levels of Chinese hell.

The pond is named for the number of lotus plants surrounding the area. I snapped some photos inside and out.

Next up were the spring and autumn pavilions. Here you can see more Chinese folklore and another chance to “enter the dragon,” as it were.

There was also a little pavilion where you could climb up to the second floor and take in some more views of the surrounding area.

Finally, there was the Běijí Pavilion in honor of the Běijí Xuántiān God, a warrior named Xuánwǔ. You can walk inside, but by this point, I had seen so many temples that I decided to skip them. Perhaps this is not a good outlook to have when exploring parts of Asian countries, but in all honesty, they do start to look the same after a while. It’s like seeing churches in Europe; they are beautiful and full of history, but eventually, they all start to look similar.

The second point of interest on my travels here was to go to Fo Guang Shan to see the Buddhist museum and the eight pagodas. The bus that I took to get there ended up going to Fo Guang Shan itself, which is attached to the museum and grounds, but it took me a lot of walking around and looking confused enough to have several of the Buddhist monk workers there to try to help me figure out where I needed to go and how to get there. Before getting tired and frustrated, I did get a few photos of the grounds.

When I finally did arrive at the museum and pagodas area, I saw that there were many people coming out who were dressed up in some kind of religious costume and banging drums and making other musical sounds on the way out. Apparently this place is closed on Tuesdays, but since this was Christmas Day, they opened up the museum grounds for a special “Celebration of the Gods” festival. I may have missed the ceremonies, but I still caught some of the exciting performances.

The second part of my journey was to go further into the countryside area of Meinong district so I could have a base for my trip to Maolin to see the butterflies. I thought about taking the suggestion from someone I met there to take a bus, but I was worried that it wouldn’t go close enough to my guest house. Eventually I ended up having no choice but to take a taxi since Uber was not yet set up to take cash as a form of payment. At any rate, the taxi driver, who didn’t speak that much English, did speak enough to tell me that the people in that area don’t speak standard Mandarin but instead speak a local dialect. When I finally got to the guest house and heard the owner speak, I could tell that it sounded slightly different than standard Mandarin.

The owner was very nice. He is an older man who looked to be in his 60s, and he runs the guest house property. For a while, I thought he ran it all by himself, but later on, I saw two “ayis” who came by to help with cleaning the rooms. His English name is Robert, but I didn’t get his native name. The property and area looked nice and had an authentic rural charm to them.

Robert offered to drive me to and from the Butterfly Valley area, so I really appreciated that. Unfortunately, the weather was not cooperating, and it was just cloudy out. I saw only a few butterflies while walking around, and it was quite difficult to capture a decent image of them with my type of camera. I ended up getting more images of the big spiders than I did of the butterflies.

Luckily, I did manage to bike (using the bike that Robert let me borrow) to an arts market not too far away. Here I bought two oil-painted umbrellas that were hand-painted for my mom and sister.

Before I left for Taipei, I wanted to make sure that I stopped over at Formosa Boulevard Station in Kaohsiung. At that subway station, there is a big stained glass display on the ceiling. There is also a light show that happens several times a day. Though the ceiling itself was quite nice, I was much less impressed by the light show. I’m not sure what I expected it to be, but it was quite underwhelming. Oh well, at least I got to see the ceiling itself.

The last leg of my journey was to Taipei. I always like to end my trips to Taiwan here because I’m most familiar with it and there are always things to do here. Since the weather was not great up north (it was drizzling and colder than the southern area), I decided not to do any hiking.

Last year, on Christmas Day, I took a cooking class. This year I took the same class with the same woman, but this time cooking different items. For a snack, the chef (Ivy) offered me a kind of paper-thin pork jerky with almonds. It was crispy and tasted slightly sweet.

For the menu, I chose to make a Taiwanese hamburger (Gua bao 刈包), Kung Pao chicken 宮保雞丁, and pineapple cakes (I couldn’t take this class without making them again).

Speaking of food, I happened to see this in a Family Mart just below my hostel.

Even though the weather in Taipei and northern Taiwan was not favorable, I did decide to take the train out to Fulong Beach. I have wanted to visit here since my first visit five years ago. I just wanted to see the ocean and also figure out how to get here for future trips. The waves seemed to be more active than I thought, which is good. While walking around here, I also saw some posters advertising other areas around here to discover. This gave me inspiration for more things to see on my next trip.

While on the subway, I noticed a woman wearing a rather interesting outfit. It’s nice to see people dressing up in authentic but unusual clothing.

Since I was here for Christmas, I decided to also spend New Year’s Eve here. I had wanted to see the fireworks at the Taipei 101 Tower for a while, and now was my chance. Of course, the weather was crappy and drizzling with low hanging clouds, but after I discovered that I could see the tower (from a distance) from the top of my hostel, I decided to stick it out and watch from there. I did not want to deal with crowds and take forever to get back home.

While I enjoyed my time here, I think next time I will try to come when the weather is warm or hot.