Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

We started our last day in Kinmen Island by visiting a family shop that made lots of knifes out of the artillery shells the chinese shot at them:

and after 50 years, they still have much supply of material

this is how they do it

They gave us a demo of how they do their knifes:

this piece of shell metal is turned into a crude knife first, and then into a nice one

Obviously my opinion of the repressive dictatorship of china (which calls itself a people's republic) is well known, but seeing who much damage they did to their own civilians who happened to live on those islands just because of how much they wanted to prevent a real democratic china (now Taiwan) from existing, sure didn't improve my opinion of China. The displays I saw claimed China launched about 1 million shells on those 2 islands to destroy and kill as much as they could, until the US started getting more involved and they eventually stopped.

Next, we went to the military cemetary, which was also the start of a hike to the top of the island which houses a very nice temple (thankfully it was high enough not to have been damaged by the war):

That island also had a big tunnel built in sheer rock to allow resupply ships to arrive under cover of falling shells and be unloaded inside the cave package before being sent back:

resupply barges looked like this

We also went to see more villages:

On our way back to the airport, we saw a temple only accessible via a path you can walk at low tide, and a park with aviation pieces:

And this was it for KinMen Island. We took a plane to fly back to Taipei. We went directly to Taipei 101 and to visit the Google Office there, from which we took a few pictures:

After Google, we had dim sums at the famous Xiao Long Bao in Taipei 101, and its marketplace:

thankfully we got in before the line got crazy long

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