Day 14: Danshui

On Tuesday we went to a town outside of Taipei called Danshui, which means 'freshwater.' It is by the ocean and you can look across the bay at an island whose main feature is Guanyin Mountain. Guanyin is a Buddha with female characteristics, and if you look at the mountain from a certain angle it looks like Guanyin laying down. Here is my mom and I in front of the mountain, sorry I didn't take off my hat so you can't see my face
People from Taipei come to Danshui to eat seafood and go shopping. We didn't eat any seafood because I don't think my aunt likes it, but we did go shopping and I bought another chi-pao (woohoo!). After shopping, we went to see two old buildings built by Europeans. The first building is called Red Castle because it is made of red brick. It is a mansion built in 1899, apparently by someone very wealthy, and is supposed to recall Dutch architecture.

The second building was really interesting. They are actually two buildings that used to be a Dutch fort (the Dutch colonized Taiwan in the 1600s) but at least one of the buildings was used as a British consulate in the 1800s and early 1900s. They excavated a few artifacts from the building, of which the best one is a baby stroller with suspension. You can see the coil springs above the four wheels of the stroller. One thing I found funny was that in Chinese the buildings are called "Red Hair Fort." Asian people really like hair colors other than black; it is cool and Western. I guess they must have found red hair particularly interesting, so they named the fort after people with red hair, as if all Dutch people have red hair. I also once saw a Taiwanese TV show where they had a puppet of the host's Russian girlfriend and gave the puppet blonde hair, even though the girlfriend had brown hair. I think other colored hair must be fascinating to some Taiwanese people.

Anyway, you can see the two buildings in the picture below. My mom and I are standing in two huge wooden clogs, I think they are there because Taiwanese people like kitschy Western things.

The colonizers were really smart to build up high where they did. They have an awesome view of Guanyin Mountain, and could also control the harbor because they can see the entrance to the ocean (which is not pictured but is to the right of the mountain).

From 'Red Hair Fort' we went to some random Presbyterian university which I had never heard of but have to include because the garden was so beautiful।

After stopping by there, we went to the harbor which had great views. My cousin said at night the white bridge at the harbor lights up and people shine different colors on it to change the color.