3/8 Taipei

3/8/2013: My second day in Taipei involved a trip to the zoo and a visit to the National Palace Museum. I had originally planned on taking advantage of the free bike rental from my hotel to travel around the city, but it would have been a lot of biking on what turned out to be not a very nice bike. From the hotel to the zoo it is around 18km (11 miles) and then from zoo to NPM another 20km or so (12.4 miles), and then maybe 15km back to the hotel. I opted to take public transportation and reached the zoo by 11am or so. I was most interested in seeing the "Taiwanese" section, since I thought there might be some interesting animals that have evolved on the island. There was a Formosan Black Bear and some Formosan Macaques that were interesting, and then a few small cat-like animals, but nothing mind-blowing. I suppose Taiwan hasn't been separated from the mainland for long enough for any extreme divergence in evolution. There were also some animals that looked like mountain goats called Formosan Serows. I kept wandering and saw a croc, some pandas, some koalas, and some elephants. It was a good zoo, but not too different from any other zoo (except that it only cost around $2 to get in).

I took the train northwest to the National Palace Museum, stopping for some beef noodles near the Shilin Metro Stop. I hopped on a bus to get to the museum, and after a few stops an Asian girl asked me if the bus we were on was going to the NPM. I said I thought so, but her friend was looking at the route map (which was all in Chinese) and they concluded that the bus does go past the NPM but we were going the wrong direction. We got off at the next stop, crossed the street, and then learned that we had been on the right bus. Turns out they were Korean tourists - I thought the girl was reading the route map in Chinese, but apparently not. I gave them a hard time for misleading me but we found our way to the museum eventually. They were graduating early from college so their reward was a vacation in Taiwan. They were going to be elementary school teachers. I lost them after buying an admission ticket.

Rosy's description of the NPM was something like, "You know how when you toured the Forbidden City in Beijing it was kinda lame, just a bunch of empty buildings? Well all the stuff that used to be in those buildings is now in the National Palace Museum." I may not remember this correctly, but I think as the Communists were taking over China, Chiang-Kai Shek and his supporters cleared out all the artefacts from the Forbidden City and took them to Taiwan. So now Taiwan possesses 8,000 years' worth of Chinese history, and the artefacts are on display at the NPM. I heard that there are so many artefacts, at any time there is only around 15% on display. My first stop was in the "rare and historical documents" section, where there were a lot of old maps of China and Southeast Asia on display. I also saw paintings, religious artefacts, furniture, and ceramics. It was an overwhelming amount of material, but overall it was fascinating to see different items spanning 8,000 years for one civilization. I caught myself looking at a Buddhist statue from the 13th century and thinking "that's not that old" because I'd seen others from 3rd century BCE. Large Chinese tour groups flooded the building, so sometimes it was difficult to get to different displays, and other times I'd be quickly surrounded and pushed out of the way if I was at a display that the group wanted to see. A major section of the museum was Chinese calligraphy, which was lost on me because I can't read Chinese (and you can only appreciate different "fonts" for so long).

I left the museum around 5, caught the bus back to Shilin Station, and walked back over to the Shilin Night Market for some food and beer. One major drawback of the night market is the stinky tofu. It is supposedly considered a tasty treat that one can get at the Shilin Night Market, but it is a foul smell and I nearly lose my appetite whenever I smell it. I was eating something else while walking around and had to stop eating whenever I smelled stinky tofu because the smell was ruining the flavor of my meal.

I returned to my hotel around 9 and Skyped with Ariel and packed up my bags.