Taipei day trip and National Palace Museum - 20 April

One of Renalda's kids took part in a Hess English speaking competition. All 200 odd Hess branches took part in the knockout rounds of the competition and Renalda's student made it to the finals in Taipei. We took the opportunity to go see more of the city. His show and tell performance only started at 2pm so we got the 6:30am train into Taipei and went to the National Palace Museum. 

Most of China's historical artifacts were taken to Taiwan after the CMT were forced out of China by PRC forces (I think). These are mostly housed at the Palace Museum and are on a rotation that apparently takes many years to complete. You can come every 2 months and see new things every time!

Me standing at the gate to a traditional garden

2 hours was not enough! You actually need the whole day, but looking and reading is hard work, especially when most things are in Chinese and there are millions of people around you. Next time I think we will take a guided tour. Unfortunately no pictures inside.

The National Palace Museum gate in the background

Renalda with the same gate in the background

The Palace Museum main building

One of the lions (?) guarding the museum

Another view of the main gate

We got a brief rundown of Chinese history. Then we saw some copies of western media written about Taiwan around the turn of the century, at that stage it was part of Japan. There were some beautiful sketches for an illustrated British newspaper on display. There were also some wonderful jade carvings and descriptions of how jade instruments and jewelry were/are made. The most beautiful piece was the famous Jadeite Cabbage with a grasshopper hiding in it's leaves, amazing!!

One of the administration buildings or outer buildings of the complex

The floor above the entrance level of the museum

Renalda with the museum complex in the background

Another exhibit was regarding bronze casting, but by that stage we were on our way out. It showed the history of casting with illustrations of the process that appear to be very similar today. There were a few bronze potjies that made my stomach rumble ;) So went to hunt for some lunch.

Taiwan style bunny chow and trotter soup, very yummy, but a bit pricey

We then went to one of the Universities close by, where the competition was taking place. We were very happy when Steve came second on the island in his competition! We can't claim any credit for Renalda yet, but it was good to show face and to be there with his parents while he was on stage. He won a sizable amount of money!
We then took the opportunity to do a little bit of shopping and then took the late train home, arriving in DaJia after 11pm! It was a good outing.

Taipei – getting to know the city a little

We completely overslept this morning, day 2 of our Taiwan adventure. Perhaps our jetlag experiment didn’t work… or we just were really tired from our journey. Actually, I think it may be the latter, because it’s 22:15 as I start writing this post and I think I am suitably tired, but not exhausted and I think I will sleep well tonight again. I think we’ll know for certain tomorrow, but no signs of jetlag yet. Fasting seems to work!

Today our missions were:

·         Check out the Taipei MRT (Mass Rapid Transport)

·         Go see the Taipei 101

·         Go to the Shilin night market

·         Get a little lost

We succeeded in all of these. We were initially planning to go find the Shilin district to make sure we could get to it later this evening, but when we got on the train we decided it was a doddle and wasn’t necessary. Being from gas guzzling South Africa, I’ve had very little exposure to tube travel, I’ve been on the London underground a few times, on the Paris metro once, and on the Cologne and Basel trams before but I don’t think any of these can really beat the Taiwanese. This place works like clockwork. Queues pained on the platform to suggest where to board and get off the train, I’m sure London didn’t have those when I was there.

The train itself was super clean and almost too symmetrical. As I looked down the length of the train, I thought I was in a mirrored elevator, where the image repeats forever. It doesn’t help that the culture is so homogenous here…

I saw an advert for “Comfort Women” in one of the stations… what’s with that? There were signs in the train about sexual harassment, it’s surprising in such a law abiding country! I also remember hearing the train’s motors whining like an unhappy puppy…interesting.

Old Taipei South Gate

We got out at Taipei Main station and decided to walk one or two stations down towards the old city. We walked past the Presidential building, but unfortunately it was too late to go for a tour. There were military police everywhere, it was the government district, but still there was a guy guarding what looked like a bulletin board… what the…? On the other side of the wall, on which the “bulletin board” was hung, there was a severely dilapidated single story building in what looked like a traditional Chinese style architecture… what the…?

We then saw the old south gate of Taipei, which is an impressive old building; unfortunately it was now a traffic circle so we could not access it.

National Theatre Building

We then continued on Aiguo Street towards the National Theatre… now that is one impressive building!

And around the corner was the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial. Another imposing building!

Chiang Kai Shek Memorial

With a much larger than life statue, and 2 guards with an hourly changing of the guard ceremony, which we missed.

Chiang Kai Shek in bronze

We then looked around the museum two floors down, where we met an interesting guy who told us about the exhibition of calligraphy there. He also said we should go to one of the hot spring spa’s north of Taipei, which we may try tomorrow. We went downstairs to buy a few curios, and saw a girl stamping her “passport”. It seems that all over Taiwan places produce stamps for you to say that you have been there!

So of course I bought one, and have been trying to find stamps for it ever since!! There’s something about a passport full of stamps ;)

We then went in search of lunch and walked down a random street into what looked like a mom and pop diner serving deep fried chicken and veggies with soup on the side. Yum Yum. We tried not to eat the rice ;P and it was only $100 something like R40. It reminded me of KFC, without the salt and the batter and the horrible tasting secret herbs and spices. It was just good crispy chicken. And the soup!! Wow, it was in a huge cauldron with what looked like chicken, celery, seaweed and egg in it. It tasted divine.

Yummy something lunch

Taipei 101 was a bit disappointing as it was overcast, so the $500 would have been wasted. The mall was a mall like any other, once you’ve seen a mall, you’ve seen ‘em all.

A rainy Taipei 101

The public art in Taipei has been fantastic, it seems like it’s everywhere. From oil paintings suggesting pictures of trees, birds and dragons, to these changing photographs shown below.

Public Art Changing

       

If I remember correctly it’s about the connection between age and youth.

More public art changing

   

As the images change each block has text or other pictures displayed quickly. Some poetry no doubt.

The Taiwanese seem so friendly! On the train we met an old man promoting a free Taiwan recognised as a state by the rest of the world. I get his point, but what do you do about it. China is huge, Taiwan is small… I know it’s much more complicated than that, but I don’t know enough to hold an opinion.

Cabbage omelette something

The Shilin night market is huge, we got off the train and went towards it, but missed the main market place for at least an hour while walking around the other shops in the district. It was vibrant and busy as expected and the food was everywhere. We had a few things which we have no idea about, but they tasted good. I think the first thing was some kind of omelette with cabbage and spicy salt. We had something else that looked like squid encased in jelly and deep fried, tasted good. We then had a pile of veggies packed into a cone and smothered in batter, also deep fried, also yummy. We then went looking for veggies and found the “real” market and it’s food court. But we were almost full and there were very few veggies to be had, but I see another trip in the near future.

Renalda holding some sweet ginger tea

There were other interesting things like pigs livers and hearts and chicken “runaways”/walkie talkies/ie chicken feet. We found a place to serve us what looked like a pile of spinach on top of another pile of garlic, with some broth on top…did I say yum? We also found some sickly sweet ginger tea.

We couldn’t finish it between us. And I finally found a decent portion of veggies, broccoli, cabbage and seaweed, steamed and mixed with a spicy salt. The seaweed was fantastic.

After that, home time.