Wanderer in Taipei - Day 6

Taipei day 6 - 29 Oct


Last day in Taipei

My flight was scheduled to leave Taoyuan Airport at 6pm. So I had plenty of time for one last look at Taipei and planned to drop by some parks and museums.

I lugged my heavy luggage to the Taipei Main Station and put all my luggage in a big locker. It costs NT$100 for one day use. It was a good thing I had scouted out the place early and found out where the lockers were. It was tough lugging a heavy luggage weighing more than 20kg even though it had wheels. Definitely not very ergonomic.






Peace Park （二二八和平公园)




I then went to the 228 Peace Park. This was the park that was known as the New Park and was the setting for the famous novel Crystal Boys （孽子）by Bai Xianyong （白先勇）. The park was unlike what I expected. I had imagine it a big park with lots of trees. It was a lot smaller than I thought and was quite an open park, with the trees sparsely planted. I remembered from the novel that the pond on which the pavillions stood were filled with lotus flowers. What I found was there the pond were bare and empty, with only a few isolated cluster of lilies.


Chiang Kai Shiek Memorial Hall （中正纪念堂）

The Chiang Kai Shiek Memorial Hall was huge monument. At first I thought it was a big structure built for no other reason then to house a statue Chiang Kai Shiek (蒋介石）. Of course I was wrong. The huge structure was actually a multi-storied building. Approach from the front, it looked like a giant shrine. But there were ground level entrances from the sides which give access to the exhibition halls within the building.

Very much like the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall, the Chiang Kai Shiek Memorial Hall had a number of galleries and exhibition halls and was buzzing with activities. There were of course exhibition halls dedicated to Chiang Kai Shiek. However, there were also other exhibition going on. There was a series of sculptures of mothers by a Taiwanese artist.

It happened that there was an exhibition of a mammoth going on. The entrance fee was NT$200. I was not sure if the exhibition will ever get to Singapore and I thought it was interesting enough to check it. It was not a very big exhibition, but there will many interesting information about elephants and mammoth. There was a construction of the mammoth skeleton from fossil bones. But the focus of the exhibition was the mammoth head that was unearthed in ... It had been preserved in permafrost and the skin, flesh and wool was still intact. It was keep in a refrigerated glass box.


I swooned at CKS Memorial Hall


There was a group of students exercising in front of the memorial hall and their coach caught my eyes. I have not spotted too many good looking guys in Taipei. And here was a very attractive guy. When he spoke, he voice was deep and clear, projected very well. I'll confess I swooned.






National Museum of History （国立历史博物馆）

It appeared to me that the National Museum of History in Taipei is being over-shadowed by the Royal Palace Museum and is being over-looked.

While it is of a much smaller scale, I found it to be as interesting as the Palace Museum. The admission to the museum was only NT$30 and it is almost deserted when I was there.

Of particular interest to me was the Buddhist stone sculptures and stele on the first floor of the museum from the Northern and Southern dynasties.

The second floor had a display of snuff bottles. I am not particularly interested in snuff bottles. However, what I found interesting that it had snuff bottles of many different type material with different type of art work on it. There was also a corner about the coffee culture and history in Taiwan.

On the third floor, there was, among other things, a collection of bronze wares from the Warring States Period and porcelain from Tang dynasty, which are similar to what you can find in the Royal Palace Museum. There was also a few very old Tibetan Buddhist tangkas.

There was an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy going on when I was there. The works were very interesting as they were all brush works of Kanji characters (Chinese characters) in a rather pictorial form.

The Bontanical Gardens 植物园

The Bontanical Gardens was just behind the Museum of History. It was about 1:30pm when I got out of the Museum. I was hungry and tired and my legs were hurting. I decided to skip the gardens.

As I walked pass the gate of the garden I took a look at the map and what caught my eye was that there is a corner in the garden known as Sutra Garden. My interest perked, I decided to drop in and take a quick look.

It turned out to be quite a pleasant garden. I would like to have spend more time in the garden if I wasn't so tired and had more time. It took more a while to find the sutra garden because strangely it was not on the maps within the gardens.

The sutra garden was a corner where it had various trees mentioned in the Buddhist scriptures. It had the Sankrit name as well as the scripture in which the tree was mentioned. It was quite interesting, but I did not have much time to linger and I could not recognize most of the trees nor scriptures to related very well to them.

20kg of books

When I got out of the garden, I was running late. I head to Longhshan Temple area to grab a quick lunch and rushed back to Taipei Main Station to get my luggage. It was 3:45pm when I got onto the airport bus, 45 minutes behind my planned schedule.

Strangely the check-in counters were deserted at the airport. Well I got checked in with still time to catch my breath before boarding.

I had been a little worried that my luggage was too heavy. The check-in luggage turned out to be 19.6 kg, just a little shy of the 20kg limit. I guessed hand carry-on luggage was probably another 8 to 10 kg. Books sure are heavy. I did a count when I got back. I bought a total of 46 books, including 10 which my sister wanted.

It had been a fun trip and I decided I'd like to come back again.