July 3

Today we went to the National Palace Museum. I mentioned in the last post that Chaing Kai-Shek kept moving China’s gold reserves and artwork around the nation of China as they fled from the Communists. Well eventually they transferred it all to Taiwan and this is the museum that they built for it. Many say that the best historic Chinese art and artifacts can be found in this museum. It is located a little outside the main city of Taipei, so we had to take two buses to get there. The building itself is beautiful and I always love seeing the Chinese style architecture in the buildings. 

Rebecca and I enjoyed the museum a lot. We started on the top with the bronze sculptures and artifacts. We both felt like that was interesting, but with the amount of artifacts that they had it became a little dry by the end of the floor. We both loved the second and third floors though. Those floors included ceramics, jade carvings, paintings, and furniture. We spent the whole day in the museum with a short lunch break half way through. We finished up with the museum by visiting a small children’s section with a few interactive exhibits. 

After the museum we walked a couple miles to the night market for this area. It is supposed to be one of the top five night markets in Taipei. Rather than having a dedicated place like the night markets that we went to in Hualien, Tainan, and Jilong, this night market just wove its way in and out of the streets. There were lots of food and clothing vendors on each side of the road. There were even mobile ones in the middle of the road; however, when we attempted to buy something from one of the middle ones, she quickly closed up her shop and rolled her cart down the middle of a side alley. We saw all the other middle ones follow after her. I asked someone what had happened and they said that someone had spotted a police officer. So I guess maybe the mobile places do not have a permit to sell things at the market. We saw them throughout the whole night moving their carts back and forth out of the little side alleys to avoid the police as they would walk by. It was late by the time we left that night market and I don’t think we got back to our apartment until 9pm or so that night.

Paper airplanes was a major activity for our kids on this trip. They had no other toys and we had very limited space, so everywhere we went they would gather as much paper as the could and then when we were back at our apartment make dozens of paper airplanes. Here is Agnes throwing one in the bathroom.




Outside of the National Palace Museum






One of the weapons exhibits.







Sorry about the poor pictures, I don't really know how to get the lighting right.










Read the sign at the bottom of the picture to see what this statue actually was.

























At a park on the way to the night market.






One of the side roads of the shilin night market.



Some giant sausages on a stick.






A cheesy potato with lots of toppings.