Just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who has been reading. This little travelogue has been viewed over a thousand times now – not too shabby. Be sure to leave your email address when you comment. I finally figured out that I can respond to the comments via email. (That only took a month.) Training and prep for summer camp are starting tomorrow (Tuesday, July 1) and the first of four groups of campers will descend on us bright and early on Monday, July 7. Look for a few posts this week detailing my trip to Kenting. First up, though, is the post I promised about street art in Tainan.

This is me, fresh off the train in Tainan, at the Tainan Visitor Information Center. I’d stopped here two days previous and talked with Cherry (she’s the girl nearest me) who helped me get on my way to see the temples I’d been wanting to check out. She was very helpful, so I stopped in again two days later (Friday, June 20, for those who are wondering) and asked for directions to the Five Canals (or Channels) district. I was looking for more temples and an older shopping district that I wanted to check out. Cherry told me where to have the taxi driver drop me off and I went on my way.

The taxi ride was fine, nothing exciting. I got out and started walking down a street, not really paying attention to where I was going, but fairly certain that I was headed in the right direction. I walked down a couple of blocks, filled with interesting shops, but there wasn’t a temple in sight. I finally stopped for a moment, took out my map and tried to orient myself. After consulting one of the shop owners, we determined that I needed to backtrack a bit and go over a couple of streets.

On my way to my newly mapped destination, I stumbled across this street art project, Art Street in Tainan (music plays when you open the link, so you may want to turn your speakers down) on Hai An Road. The site does have some information in English, as well some more images from the art on the street.

This was the first installation I saw. I couldn’t believe my luck in running across it and thought that it was just a fluke until I found more street art in the area.

I love that the artists in both this location and the previous one left the remnants of the buildings visible and creating something beautiful out of the bones of the buildings.

There were also quite a few murals throughout the area. Over the course of my walk, I think that I saw around nine or ten different installations of street art, but I think that I missed quite a few.

I turned the corner to walk down to where I saw a temple was and found this sculptor working in his studio. He was gracious enough to let me take pictures of him at work and his works in progress.

Just down the street from the sculptor, was another studio belonging to a much younger artist. He, too, allowed me to take pictures (these are from the walls of his studio). I chatted with him a little while he re-hinged the very old doors to his studio and then went off in search of temples. I found four, but to this day I still don’t have a clue as to which – if any- of he temples I visited were the ones I wanted to see – no one seemed to know their names in English and I didn’t know the Chinese names for any of them.

Finally, after a lots of walking, a conversation with a bird (it spoke, I asked it if it spoke English, it nodded and puffed itself up importantly, and then I called it a liar – silly bird), I stumbled across a store called Beetles Jungle. There was a bird on a perch and both a dog and a rooster in separate cages. Inside there were (either alive or dead and pinned to cards) huge beetles – most of them along the lines of the rhinoceros beetle. And then there was this bunny. So cute. I really do seem to find all the animals.

Up next: My trip to Kenting….