We woke up early Sunday morning and we actually had a plan! I couldn't believe it {we never have a plan!} now granted we walked 10 feet out of the hotel and then realized we forgot to ask the hotel about the bus schedule for this said "plan" but a little extra exercise won't kill us! We enjoyed a breakfast buffet at the hotel {and by enjoy I mean I found something that remotely resembled food I wanted (I was not feeling the Taiwanese breakfast that morning!) and by breakfast I mean noodles and rice}...there will be a post on this later! And headed out the door for Rainbow Village.
This blog post has some great information about the village if you want to read more than what I have here.
The Rainbow Village is actually a military dependents village set up in the 1940's when the Chinese Nationalist Party fled China and moved to Taiwan. Many of the military men that came to Taiwan brought with them their families and thus the military dependents villages were set up throughout the country as temporary housing. Well, like many things go, "temporary" lasted longer than intended and temporary for some turned into permanent.
Fast forward 60 years to the 1990's and the government decided it was time to begin tearing down most of these cramped and poorly built villages & cluster of homes to make room for new and larger buildings to be built. Though protests were made most of the homes were torn down and very few remain, other than that of Mr. Huang Yong-Fu, also known as "Rainbow Grandfather", who created a more peaceful protest by painting his entire village with bright rainbow designs, animals, and characters.
His village still stands, and is occupied by several families, today and is known to tourists and Taiwanese locals alike as "Rainbow Village"
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| The 'famous' Rainbow Iron man that takes pictures at the village |
After our time at Rainbow Village, we caught a bus back into
Taichung and began to look for lunch..boy was that an experience! We ended up
at a “mall” called ‘little SE Asia’ hosting stores, restaurants, strange
people, and dead animals from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, etc. Hands down this
was the dirtiest mall, shopping center, whatever you’d like to call it that I
had ever been in! We were looking for something to eat and Tina leans over and
asks “do you think this is safe to eat!?” Well, we ate lunch and we are still
kicking, so it must have been ok! The Vietnamese food was amazing, the karaoke
was loud, and our server Rolley Wang {I can’t make this stuff up} was a little
too touchy; but dang it, we found lunch!
After lunch we ran into a group of guys we had met Saturday
night and they convinced us to explore the remaining floors of this ½ abandoned
mall with them including (but not limited to) finding a rundown bowling all,
making friends with a dead ½ eaten lizard, climbing multiple sets of broken
escalators, and finally going to a bar just in time for their weekly ARC checks
{just to make sure we were legal && documented}.
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| ARC's out people, ARC's out! |
You’d think we would have called it a day after that lol,
but we weren’t quite finished with our to-do list for the day, so before boarding
the train home we hopped in a cab to check out Paochueh Temple boasting one of
the largest laughing Buddha statues in Taiwan && it did not disappoint!
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