Lee and I ventured into the city last night to look for some dinner and a little diversion from our neighborhood. We live a couple miles north of the center of the city, out in the higher end, up-and-coming area of Gushan, and while it's lively enough with night markets and street fairs it's not like being downtown with all the glitz and neon.

Four stops on the MRT (mass rail transit - Koahsiung's subway) and we were at Central Park. It's not anywhere near as big as NYC's but lovely, just the same. We found a nice little place to eat using the tried and true method of wandering down little streets and finding tables on the sidewalks full of happy looking diners. If the place is busy the food must be good.

Many of the restaurants we find to eat at are just counters where you place your order (this one had an English translation of their menu!) and tables and chairs on the sidewalk. The food is served one plateful at a time and you dig in when it arrives, while your dining companions look on hungrily. For US$7 we had grapefruit iced tea, kung pao and Thai spiced chicken, rice, scrambled eggs, steamed greens, some other vegetable I couldn't identify and seaweed tied in knots.

After fueling up we walked over to the park and were surprised to find our creepy little doll friends.

Either it's some traveling exhibit or they really do sprout from seeds and grow in random meadows around the country.

An even better discovery was this group of young men dancing with fire.

We decided we need to get into town more often!