A trip to Danshui

This weekend our Asian history, culture, and politics professor invited all four of us American exchange students to visit his home in Danshui and spend the night. We did, and it was wonderful.

Danshui is a smaller city near Taipei, and it's a popular tourist destination because of the old European architecture, the docks by the sea, and the fact that you can get there by the MRT.

Most of the evening was spent talking, and our professor is an interesting guy to talk with -- he has a very international perspective from living in Taiwan, getting a degree in England, travelling in Europe and Central America, and doing various international relations jobs. It's fascinating to hear that kind of international perspective, because it's surprising.

We also learned the differences between numerous different kinds of tea, and tried warm sake. One thing I've definitely learned by coming here is that there really are major differences between teas -- even very similar teas.

We slept in a Japanese-style guest room. When I say "Japanese style", I don't just mean that the decor was modelled after that of Japan. I mean that the floor was a raised hard wood platform, and that's where you sleep. Making a bed consists of laying down some duvet and a pillow. Very traditional, and very foreign to most Americans -- us included. We didn't have particularly soft mattresses because we didn't have mattresses. We had a wooden floor. It was surprisingly comfortable, and had the handy side-effect that you could turn over in bed without making a horrible racket and bothering the other people in the room. I actually think that, if you want to get several people sleeping in the same room, Japanese-style bedding arrangements are one of the best possible ways to do it.

In the morning we went for a walk around scenic Danshui. When the British empire was active in the area, they used Danshui as a port. It was used for similar purposes by some other colonial powers, and it was the destination of the Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay. That makes for a very pretty town, with some foreign-looking architecture.

Here's a gallery of the photos I took.

We had lunch at the red castle, which used to be a Dutch fort, then a British consulate, and now is a restaurant with a good selection of seafood. I liked the oysters.

Danshui has got to be one of the prettiest places I've seen near Taipei -- right up there with Keelung, but with better weather.