My Travel Adventures

We got Thursday and Friday off this week for Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday commonly associated with the death of the poet Qu Yuan (but which, in reality, seems to have had a much more complex past, viz. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Boat_Festival ). According to the story, Qu Yuan drowned himself upon finding out that the state of Qin had captured the capital of his homeland. The locals raced to retrieve his body in their boats, and when they did not find it, threw sticky rice balls in the river so that the fish would not eat the dead poet. Allegedly, the race for Qu Yuan’s body became the dragon boat race, and the rice balls (zongzi) originally fed to the fish became the main food associated with the holiday.

I originally intended to get some administrative tasks done after spending the Saturday in Keelung, but the weather was so nice that it became difficult to persuade myself to stay indoors. I remembered that Taipei still has many sights I have not seen, especially in the more historical part along the eastern bank of Tamsui river. Flipping through the pages of my guidebook, I happened upon a section dedicated to Datong – I decided to make a few-hour trip there.

I departed for Taiwan on the Saturday of September 7 th . I arrived on the 8 th in an unremarkable manner, exchanged some money at the airport to see how exchange rates would compare to those in the city, and took a taxi to my hotel. I was tired and very quickly fell asleep.