Fort San Domingo

Since I moved to Taiwan I have only been bike riding a couple times. The last several months I have been really missing it. I haven't wanted to buy a bike because I don't want to deal with getting rid of it when I leave. So Sunday Esther and I went up to Danshui, a coastal town that is beautiful and has places to rent bikes and trails to ride. We were both pretty tired because we had stayed up a little too late the night before, but we were going to do this dammit!
We rented the bikes and set off . The streets of Danshui on a weekend are really crowded with people, scooters and cars which makes navigating on a bike an interesting experience.
I think we were on the bikes a total of about fifteen minutes when we came across Fort San Domingo and decided to stop and check it out.
Happily because it's Sunday there is no entrance fee. Yay!
Taiwan has been occupied by several different countries. This particular fort is obviously Spanish. I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside the fort itself, but here are a few of the surrounding grounds and barracks type area.
This is the hill leading up to the fort. Very exciting isn't it?

Here is a shot of the main building. Note the scaffolding. They are doing some repairs and maintenance.

View from the fort.
This is the kitchen for the barracks and prisoners. It's just slightly bigger than the one I have.

There are random statues scattered around this area of the fort. They're rather creepy. Especially the one that is inside one of the prison cells. This statue is in an exercise yard. The yard is roughly the size of my current living room. For a living room it's a pretty good size, but for an exercise yard it's positively tiny.

Cannons with lights mounted inside the tubes.
At some point there was also Dutch occupation which is the only plausible explanation I can come up with for the shoes. How could we resist getting our picture taken inside of them? Can't be done. Had to ask an unsuspecting bystander. The randomness of Taiwan continues.