Monday, July 1, 2013

Taipei Personalities (Part 1)

The museum is on the right.
They don't allow any photography.
Maura:

We arrived at Catherine's house outside of Taipei late on Thursday night. We awoke early the next morning and set out for a full day of sight-seeing. We started with the National Museum of Taiwan. In 1949, when the nationalists and the communist movement were at war in China, Chiang Kai-Shek and the nationalists moved almost all of China's historical artifacts and artistic treasures to Taiwan to keep them safe. Since he and his compatriots never returned to mainland China, the treasures remained in Taiwan and are now displayed here. This museum has the largest collection of Asian art and cultural pieces in the world over 680,000 artifacts, including a carved jade cabbage that seems to be their cultural equivalent to the Mona Lisa!

This is the National Theater, which is opposite the National
Concert Hall.  Both are in the plaza in front of the Memorial.
After the museum, we met up with Catherine's friend, Jenny, a native Mandarin speaker and sophomore in high school, who joined us for the rest of our time in Taipei. We then had a delicious lunch of pot stickers, dumplings, and soup courtesy of Jenny's helpful ordering! After lunch, we visited the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, which was amazing to see in person.
This is the Memorial.

Changing of the guard.
Then, we went and had tea with Bishop David Lei, the head of the Episcopal church in Taiwan. He taught us about the traditional way of serving tea and that adding milk or sugar is a BIG no no! Then, we headed back to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial to see the changing of the guard and were on our way to the Tamsui night market, when Tom spotted something called a Coffee Hot Dog. Yes, you rea
d that correctly. A hot dog wrapped in a coffee bun. Well, who could resist? Not Tom, apparently.
Mmmmm...coffee dog.
There were paddle boats giving harbor cruises.
The night markets are very popular in Taiwan as it is (a little) cooler when the sun goes down and people can go out for cheap food, shopping, and socialization without melting. This market had some delicious food including freshly made juices, fish ball soup, a-gei (tofu with rice noodles cooked inside), fried noodles, and soft serve ice cream. Tamsui is most famous for something called "Iron eggs" which we brought back to share with the St. James teachers.
They put American soft-serve to shame.


No comments:

Post a Comment