Taiwan Trip, Day 3

The next day I got up extra early, feeling excited. I was planning to finally visit the National Palace Museum, one of the main reasons I had gone to Taiwan in the first place. Because I am a huge museum geek, I figured I would probably spend most of my day there, and I didn’t really plan anything else for that day.



I took the subway to Shilin station and then took a cheap bus in order to get to the museum. It was easy and inexpensive. The museum itself is quite impressive looking, in a kind of faux Chinese style, and painted green. A lot of people were taking pictures outside of the building. If you faced away from the building, you could see some huge somewhat dingy looking buildings—apartment blocks? I wonder what they were.

After that, I went into the museum and did my art history geek thing. Almost inevitably, it was a bit of a let down. They did have some amazing things there, however—one of their star items is a cabbage made of jade, and also a piece of stone made to look like a slab of meat. Those were really interesting—they date from the Qing dynasty (which stretched from the 17th century to the 20th century. They are kind of like curiosities—the craftsmanship was still amazing, however. The other collections were excellent too, of course, but less memorable. I did end up having a bit of a disappointment. I was really looking forward to seeing the museums collection of paintings—in particular, they own Fan Kuan’s Tang-era `Travelers Among Mountains and Streams` and a number of other extraordinary early period paintings. But unfortunately, the whole section was closed for remodeling! I was really disappointed. I wanted to come back later—it would be opened by the time I returned to Taiwan, the day before leaving. But I was not able to go back, and that was a shame.

However, I did go to the gift shop and spend a lot of money! I got a cute key strap in the shape of a cabbage, salt and pepper shakers in the shape of bronze Shang bells, and a few books about the collection, which were quite inexpensive. I stopped at a nice little café in the museum and had some good dessert. Then I headed back home to the hostel. I was planning to leave Taipei the next day, and needed to make my final plans.

Taiwan Trip, Day 2

My second day in Taiwan I woke up bright and early (kind of) but unfortunately I almost immediately realized I felt really crappy. Some kind of stomach bug maybe? I hadn't even eaten very much yet at that point, so I don't know why. At any rate, I sat on the couch in the living room and felt sorry for myself for a few hours. Eventually I did start feeling better, and I decided that I didn't want to waste my whole day! It was probably around 11 or 12 that I finally ventured out of the house. I was planning on going to the National Palace Museum, but I wanted to spend an entire day there! So, in the end, I ended up just doing some random stuff. It was a really fun day!

I started the day out with a nice meal at a little coffee shop/cafe place near my hotel. Just a sandwich, I believe it was. I decided to go to Chiang Kai-Shek's memorial hall, first of all. I just wanted to have a look, since it was quite famous and impressive looking. I took the subway again--it really does work so well! The weather was very nice, as you can see, and just a little bit chilly.



There were a number of big fancy buildings near the memorial hall--a theater and a strange gate thing. It was a fairly impressive work of public architecture. I believe you can usually go inside it but it was closed when I was there--they were remodeling the inside, I think, to make it less rah-rah Chiang Kai-Shek. Turns out he was kind of a dick. They renamed it the "National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall" apparently. But I didn't get to see the museum which is apparently inside the building. The surrounding gardens are also quite nice, and I enjoyed a quick walk.

That visit did not really occupy much of the day, however, so I took the subway to the end of the line and then managed to find a bus (by pointing inquiringly at the entry in my guide book and looking hopefully at various bus dudes) to the place I wanted to go--which was a place called Yeliou. According to Lonely Planet, it was a nice place by the sea with interesting rock sculptures, and I really wanted to see the sea! Ironically, although I know live on an island, I almost never see the sea--much less than when I lived in Oregon. I got placed right smack center in the middle of Japan--pretty much as far as you can get from the sea in this country!

So I headed out on the bus. It was me and not a whole lot of other people, and I felt vaguely uneasy, but it was an adventure. I do so love adventures! The highlight of the bus trip was passing by this place--it's an abandoned resort and even from the road, you can tell it was something crazy. I had seen the pictures on the internet before I went to Taiwan, but had no idea where they were from. Seeing it suddenly from the beach was a strangely exciting feeling--I almost demanded the bus driver stop and let me go look! But there was no bus stop near the resort and we continued on to my destination instead.



When we finally got there, I was more than a little baffled. There were no signs or anything to show me the way, but I figured I would just see what happened. I started walking and soon realized Yeliou was a tiny little fishing town! There were boats and drying fish and squids all over the place. There was a pretty looking temple on a hill and a building of some kind with an inexplicable mural. People stared at me a little bit, but not in an angry or threatening way. I stopped for a brief lunch of onigiri at a convenience store (they had almost as much coverage in Taiwan as they do in Japan) and unexpectedly stumbled upon some random foreigners on motorbikes. They sketched me out a little bit, though, so I quickly continued on my way, and found the "Scenic Area" with no problem. It was near some kind of aquarium, but it didn't look very welcoming, so I just went with the Scenic Area. It was filled with tourists, which was reassuring.



The "Scenic Area" basically consisted of a long spit of land with a number of different rock formations. They were really strange looking, and it was more than worth the price, especially if you had been starved for the sea. There were fossils in the rocks,



and strange stubby-looking knobs of stone in weird formations,



and big perfecty round holes in the ground. Down in the sea there was an interesting formation that, according to the Taiwanese, looked like blocks of tofu.



The place was well presented though. It was obviously touristy and for a profit, and they just let you climb everywhere you wanted, pretty much. However, there were no big ugly concrete blocks anywhere and the man-made bits, like stairs and a lovely stone bridge, were very tastefully done.



Tourists were swarming around the most famous and popular rock formations--they all had names like the Queen's Head or Bee Hive, or Fairy's Shoe. However, the coastline continued out in a long penninsula, if you wanted to go for a walk, and I, being in the end my mother's daughter, did. You could walk all the way around the headline and get some really stunning views. Plus, as a bonus, there was almost no one there--all the tourists stayed on the lower part of the penninsula! The view was lovely.



I stayed there until it started getting dark, browsing around the gift shop a bit, and then caught the bus back to Taipei. Luckily, I was with another group--a small family of Japanese tourists were waiting for me, otherwise I might have gotten a bit nervous, because it took quite a long time for the bus to show up. But I wasn't worried. I returned to my hotel and got a private room, instead of the rather unpleasant dorm I had been put into. I "borrowed" a futon from the other bunch and made my mattress a bit softer.

Taiwan Trip, Day 1

Last year I decided to go to Taiwan for Christmas. I have always been interested in China, but was too afraid of the actual mainland China to go there by myself. I wanted somewhere relatively nearby and inexpensive, and Taiwan fit the bill. In addition, the National Palace Museum in Taipei has an extraordinary collection of Chinese art, most of it "liberated" from the Communists and the vast majority of Chinese people by the fleeing Kuomintan government. Regardless of my feelings about that, the Taiwanese have done an excellent job is preserving it and no doubt protecting it from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. I really wanted to visit the museum. Thus I bought my tickets for Taiwan and resolved to spend my Christmas and New Year's enjoying myself and doing weird new things instead of feeling homesick and sorry for myself.

I was really impressed by Taiwan! It is not exactly a popular destination, many people doing layovers if anything, but I think it is severely under-rated. It is inexpensive, but definitely a first-world country--it is fairly exotic and still unused to foreigners, especially in the south, but completely safe and with a fair number of very helpful English speakers. The places I went were beautiful, and the people unfailingly kind and helpful to a single female traveler.

With all that in mind, I set off for Taiwan. I arrived fairly late and took the bus into town. I decided to stay at the World Scholar House, an inexpensive hostel that had generally received positive reviews. It was on the top floor of a back street in Taipei. While the hostel was generally a nice place, it was unfortunately a bad time for the hostel, I think. I'm pretty sure the beds had bedbugs (they were soon after fumigated) and the bathrooms were dirty. I heard that the owner had made the always unfortunate decision of leaving the hostel in the hands of a long-term guest while she went on vacation somewhere and he had let it go to shit. Whether this was true or not, I could not in all fairness recommend this hostel. Also, the beds were really hard and it was full of mosquitoes. It may have improved since, however. The location was fairly nice and there was a Starbucks and a number of nice coffee shops nearby. A number of the people staying there are long-termers--English teachers and what not. Generally people are very friendly and there is a nice lounge area to meet people in, so it is definitely not all bad!

The first thing I noticed was just how hot it was in Taiwan. It was quite a bit more hot and humid than I had expected, considering it was winter time. The first day was especially warm. I felt just fine in only a t-shirt. Unfortunately, it also started to rain that day and much of the day was spent under an umbrella. I still had fun, though!

I woke up and headed to a Starbucks. This was the start of my sweet sweet romance with Starbucks coffee—believe it or not, I had never before really tried coffee from Starbucks. But at this one, a peppermint latte looked extremely delicious and I had to try it out. That was it—I was addicted! I was also pleasantly surprised by the girl who worked at the counter, as her English was excellent.

My destination for my first day in Taiwan was the Wanhua area, one of the more traditional parts of Taipei. Although there is very little in the way of ancient buildings or whatnot in Taiwan, some of the city still retains a distinctively rustic feeling. This was definitely true of the enjoyable Wanhua area. In order to get there, I took the excellent metro system. It is extremely cheap, very reliable, and clean. The way you pay is pretty cool. When you buy a ticket, you get a little plastic coin thing. When you enter the gates, you just run it over the sensor, like a SUICA card or something in Japan. When you exit, you deposit it in the gate and it lets you out. Just like in Japan, the amount that the ticket costs depends on how far you travel. If you make a mistake about how much your journey will cost, you can pay extra before you leave the station.



My first stop was the well-known Longshan Temple. It is dedicated to the goddess of mercy—Kannon in Japan, Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, and Guanyin in Chinese. I bought an adorable key-strap clay figure of Guanyin… so cute and so sacrilegious! I love it! My first impression of Longshan was of bright color and chaos. It is a big cliché, but it was really so different from a Japanese temple! The sheer magnitude of the decorations was amazing. People were everywhere, making offerings, telling their fortunes, praying, and so on.



Longshan definitely has a lot of character, and the carvings are wonderfully ornate and colorful. I really enjoyed it, and spent a lot of time looking around.



After that, I wandered around the Wanhua area a little bit. Things were dirtier and older looking than Japan—that was undeniable—but it was so full of life and character that walking around was a lot of fun.



I peeked down a tiny lane full of fortune tellers and went to an underground market full of souvenir shops. I looked at various religious souvenirs and bought some paper art depicting a Chinese folk god. I looked with lust at some of the incredibly delicious looking cakes in the shops surrounding the temple area. I walked down an indoors covered market that was full of vegetables, strange herbs, and chicken feet. It sometimes smelled terrible and was not very appetizing, but it was fascinating. I also wandered down the `Snake Alley,` but didn’t see any snakes, and wasn’t that excited by it. I think it was the wrong time of day for excitement at Snake Alley. I visited another random temple along the side of the streets and found some cheap clothing stores in back alleys. There was an awesome little restaurant full of old men that was located in a shack under what looked like a banyan tree—it was growing over the shack until it was a part of it. Very cool stuff.



I even saw another temple wedged into a bunch of gray apartment blocks.

Unfortunately, this was also the day that I discovered something that was to haunt the rest of my Taiwanese trip—I am a big wussy. Many Taiwanese restaurants have no English language menus, and many of them are just some tables on the sidewalk with unfriendly looking proprietors. I ended up having lunch at Yoshinoya! Yes, they have them in Taiwan. It was tasty, but basically just Japanese food. Ah well. Again, the clerk at Yoshinoya was both cute and brave—he also attempted to speak in English. Which is just as well, since I do not know a single word of Mandarin or Taiwanese.

I thought that was enough for my first day, and went back to the youth hostel. I had several conversations with a pleasant enough bunch of English teachers and other various long term people.