I'm not a big fan of museums but the National Palace Museum holds treasures of Chinese civilisation the like of which can only be seen in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The antiquities in both were originally from the same collection. It's a long story which might be entitled A Tale of Two Museums. Besides if I didn't go, later people would ask: you what!?
Originally I had planned to visit in the morning, but travel blogs persuaded me that late afternoon was when tour bus crowds, mostly comprising mainland Chinese tourists, thinned out. In the event it was still crowded.
I decided to move to my hotel early in the morning before the day got too humid and leave my backpack with reception. First I got coffee and a waffle at a nearby café. They weren't as good as coffee and bagels the day before. Then I dropped the keys in the return box; nobody was at reception that early.
The hotel was actually just outside Ningxia Night Market, but a 10 minute walk from the nearest train station, which might have made it a little less popular, meaning better value for me. I paid the balance in cash to reduce my holdings.
The picture on the right was actually taken later in the day from one of the elevated stations of the Taipei MTR. Not all stations are underground. Parts of some lines are above ground.
I decided to visit the main Eslite store. Maybe they might have a better selection of CDs to spend money on. While it was as neat as the other one it actually had a poorer selection of goods. So I decided to go back to the City Hall store.
While I was emerging from the building, some marchers in a rally for the upcoming local elections tried to give me a pamphlet, but I told them I was not a local.
When I paid for my CDs the cashier asked if I was a tourist. They gave me a tax refund upon sighting my passport. That meant I had missed out on a tax refund on yesterday's purchases. Didn't amount to much though.
I found a good Vietnamese lunch in the basement food court of the City Hall Eslite store.
By this time it was afternoon and time to visit the museum. It's in the foothills of Shilin, a leafy residential suburb in the north of Taipei. To get there one had to transfer from Shilin station to a bus.
Photography is not allowed in the museum, and at every corner an attendant will be holding a placard stating so, so I have no pictures from there, but you can see many of the treasures on the museum website and elsewhere. Some of them are jaw-dropping such as the jadeite cabbage and the concentric ivory spheres. I particularly liked the porcelain collection.
Impressive as individual museum pieces may be, I realised that the greatest accomplishment of the Chinese has been to maintain an unbroken civilisation for many millennia. The museum seems to agree with this idea with a panel showing a timeline of world cultures. No doubt Confucianism and Taoism, and later Buddhism, have shaped a people and culture which have weathered change and flourished.
After having a couple of bagels, cream cheese, and coffee in the shopping centre it was time for retail therapy. Taiwan is the home of a several well-known computer manufacturers. Online forums mentioned Guanghua, a 5 storey building full of computer shops, but also said that most of the stuff you could get over the Internet and bargains were few. But I was curious so I went.
The ground floor held shops selling laptops and tablets. Higher floors had PC assemblers and parts shops. Pretty much what you'd expect in an Asian computer mart. Rather devoid of customers for a Saturday.
A friend of mine had asked me to look for cement for gluing the rubber onto table tennis bats. I happened upon a small sports store where a stream of customers flowed through to have their bat rubber replaced. As you might guess, table tennis is widely played in Taiwan.
The surrounding streets had computer stores too. I didn't buy anything there either. But I had seen a stall selling radish cake before entering the mart. But when I emerged, there were no more radish cakes. Must have been a breakfast thing. In Taiwan you have to grab the food when it's on offer. I consoled myself with a red bean paste waffle.
The top rated shopping attraction of Taipei on Tripadvisor was the City Hall branch of the Eslite book store. Imagine that, a book store at number 1. This I had to see.
It was indeed extraordinary; it had a large selection of books spread across 2 or 3 floors, mostly in Chinese, many of them translations. Lots of esoteric stuff. Psychobabble best sellers mingled with scholarly works like Piketty's Capital. This was evidence of a very literate populace.
And it was very civilised of Eslite to provide not just a few sofas but a whole room full of chairs for sampling the books before buying. This is what a bookshop should be, I thought. I came away with a couple of CDs.
Besides books they also sold stationery and upmarket items such as leather goods.
I didn't want to go up Taipei 101. It was expensive, $20 to go up the super-fast elevator, squirming in crowds at every stage. But I did get a glimpse of Taipei 101 from the back of the City Hall. A bit hazy due to the moisture in the air.
By this time it was way past lunchtime, so I headed for Wufenpu where there is a clothing market. I didn't need to worry about food stalls; in Taiwan where there's a market, there's bound to be food.
The shops in Wufenpu are wholesalers and traders from other markets come here to stock up. You can see bags and bags full of shirts or pants imported from China or Korea. They will sell retail but probably would like to see you buy a few.
Let's get the food out of the way first. I had a chives pancake with egg, then watermelon juice. Later on I encountered a hawker selling ice cream rice rolls. She put three balls of ice cream topped with crushed peanuts in a rice paper sheet and rolled it up. The interesting thing was you could have coriander as garnish if you wanted. Quite tasty.
I had hoped to get some jeans and shirts but practically all the clothing on offer was women's fashion. I found nothing, which meant I had more cash left to burn up before leaving.
I was glad to get out of the crowds. By this time it was nearly evening. I went back to the upmarket food court above Taipei train station and had a pork chop rice meal. There were lots of elderly tourists in the food court. Were they in Taipei for a weekend jaunt from the country?
I explored some of the octopus like underground passages radiating from the station and eventually called it a night. I packed before turning in as I was moving to a room in a hotel for my last night to finish the holiday in a bit of luxury.
