Taipei, part 1.

We had such a busy couple of days I'm going to post a couple of times about our weekend. We met up with our friend, Simona, one of Lee's old students from Ethel Walker. She was born and raised in Taipei and was an excellent guide for us.

We heard conflicting stories on what the crowds would be like during the New Year holiday. It turns out that way more people came to Taipei than left it so the crowds were crazy. Our first stop was the Taipei 101, the second highest skyscraper in the world, where we were planning on having dinner. It's a little hard to see in this picture,

but the 140 you might just be able to make out is the number of minutes to wait for a table. Being the intrepid travelers that we are, we spent the wait time going to the 90th floor and having a look around.

I'm not sure that the elevator ride was a "journey that changed my life," but it was pretty impressive. The view was pretty impressive too, although photographs don't do it justice.

By the time we came down we'd missed our reservation but Simona turned on the charm and they managed to squeeze us in.

The next day we were up and out early to go visit the Taipei National Palace Museum. When the Japanese started advancing on Beijing in the early 1900's Chiang Kai-shek had quite a bit of the National Museum's collection packed up and shipped to southern China. Then he brought with him what he could manage to get out of communist China in the 1940's as he fled to Taiwan. As a result it was saved from being destroyed by the communist government and now represents one of the most complete collections of Chinese art from the last 4000 years.

As an American it's easy to be impressed by the age of a culture. When we were in Europe a couple years ago I was so impressed by the centuries-old paintings and sculptures we saw. But China is so much older. This weekend I'd look at some piece of art that was created in the 1500's and think, meh, because the piece next to it was equally beautiful and created in 200 B.C.E. Amazing.

This is Confucius, bestowing knowledge upon us.

Our next stop was the zoo and the gondola up to the tea plantations in the mountains. The idea was just to go on the gondola but the wait time was so long we spent a couple of hours in the zoo instead of standing in line. The layout of the zoo was such that I think we saw about ten thousand people for every zoo animal we saw. The best part was the aviary because you get to walk around where the birds live. 

This is an eye-spy. Can you see the bird hiding in the grass?

Scarlet ibis

We chose not to stand in line for the panda exhibit. I did see the baby hanging out on his wooden platform. Hard to see what all the fuss is about.

So that's it for this post. More to come...