Taiwan—Kaohsiung 2016-10-08

"The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between." - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

After a week of visiting places.  I decided to have a day of doing nothing except to meet a high school friend.

The place that I am staying provides breakfast every morning.  Today's menu is Japanese Udon and tofu miso soup. 

After breakfast, I met my high school friend.  We went to Kaohsiung Public Library (高雄市立圖書總館).  

The design concept of Kaohsiung Public Library comes from large trees. The architects make the first floor a 7.5 meter in height column-less space where citizens can read books or take a rest just like people can sit by the shade of a tree.  

The construction of the Library used is very unique and completely different from the upward one of common architectural structures. The method is called the downward construction method or suspension method.  The method utilized steel tension of the most economical design principles. Suspended steel rods of 6 to 12 centimeters in diameter were adopted in place of traditional structural column sections.  This construction method makes the columns of the ground floor gone like magic and endows the interior space with the visual permeability as well.

There are coffee shops and light-meal restaurants in the first and second floors of the Library.

When we came down from the Library, we saw a rice pizza shop.  Did you heard rice pizza?  We never heard rice pizza before.  Thus, we decided to try it.

Basically, the bottom layer is cooked rice and the top layer is tomato souce and cheese.  The taste was okay.  However, I do not think that I will try it again.

Due to the heavy rain, we had no where to go.  We went Kaohsiung Cultural Center (高雄市立文化中心) where we saw two exhibitions and a library. Unfortunately, no picture was allowed in the exhibitions.  The library has beautiful open bookshelves. 

Taiwan has many coffee shops where people can meet and hangout.  Most of the coffer shops have unique design which is very different than the corporate coffee shops like Starbucks or Seattle Best.  We went to a local coffee shop for afteroon tea.  This coffer shop does not have any special design.  However, the coffe shop provides its the second for artists to display their arts.

Oh! I forgot to mention, many of the dogs in Taiwan love to ride with their masters.  They have a great skill to balance themselves on their masters motocycles.

The design on the transformer box is very interesting.  What it looks like is to send a Taiwan passport by air mail.