Melody and Jordan Travel Memories: Taiwan Adventure Journal

Day 8, aka Jan 24th, was another drizzly day in Taipei. Streets quiet, the few pedestrians scurry by with a flurry of umbrellas and Mandarin chatter. There are fewer cars in the streets.
On this day we went to the National Palace Museum, just a few kilometres out of Taipei's city centre. You can find in google maps here. To get there, we took a city bus from one of the main city intersections in Taipei. It was a 15 bus ride or so, which drops us off in a little landing area outside the museum. As you walk in, you see a garden off to the side as well as an open stone walking area that surrounds the museum itself.

Mountains in the distance, right in the backyard of the museum, a comfortable silence pervades the scene.

The walkway up to the museum

The mountains in the distance

Outside the entrance

The actual atmosphere inside the museum was quite a different story. As soon as you enter via the main doors, you feel like you're in an airport. People are everywhere and walking in every direction. Children are chattering and running about, and adults converse and argue in large circles. Going into the exhibits, there are throngs of tour groups that are each about 30 people, each vying for window space to see a vase from the Ming dynasty or some ancient jade from the Shang dynasty. We quickly learned that the best strategy to see the exhibits without being mobbed was to erratically weave through the exhibits, looking in areas where a tour group has yet to arrive, or has just left from. This behaviour of weaving like a bumble-bee may have left me with a "wikipedia style" of information delivery but I still did see an incredible amount of ancient art.

The exhibits are divided into different categories. There was devoted entirely to jade throughout the ages. Another was a room full of many of the treaties that China had signed through the years, including original versions of some of the unequal treaties that many European nations signed with China.

Overall the museum was a good experience and a good price, but very crowded. A good place to go and look at some lovely art if you don't mind being barred from photography and the large crowds. If you really want to read all the inscriptions and explanations, consider trying to find a day that would be less busy. Apparently Chinese New Year week is one of the worst times of the year so be sure to avoid that :P

Being one of our later mornings, the few hours we spent in the museum brought us right around to dinner time, where we went back to our favourite sushi conveyor place.

Sushi Express!

Conveyor sushi makes the food taste better

Overview of Sushi Express restaurant

Being back in the area near our hotel, we walked around for a bit and found a different coffee place to hang out at. It's called Ueshima Coffee Lounge. We spent a bit of time kickin' around there and then we finished off our night with some night photography.