Taipei (museums)

so we wake up for a fun day of museum-ing and it's pouring. thankfully i come prepared with my water shoes, but a number of auburnites did not. nonetheless, we started heading towards our first museum of the day: the chiang-kai shek memorial which strongly resembles the lincoln memorial. chiang kai shek was a very famous five star general and president of taiwan. not sure about all his military accomplishments as i could not read the chinese character descriptions, but tin-man told us he was very famous for all the treasures he brought over from china when china transitioned into a communist country. china still has some stuff, but taiwan now has all the best and most expensive things :). and all these things can be viewed at the museum we went to later in the day. but while we were at the chiang-kai shek memorial we did witness the changing of the guard which was very impressive... i have a video to go along :).

we walked outside (into the rain again) and there was an nba demonstration/set-up outside... not sure why, but they had a lot of video game platforms and life-size replicas of some of the nba players' hands and feet. dwight howard apparently wears a size 18 shoe!! crazy...

but after a few hours at our first museum we were pretty famished, so we stopped along our subway route to get dumplings for lunch... quite delish. and there were a few cute shops we stopped and looked in as well.

our next musuem of the day was the palace museum. now i've been hearing a lot about this museum from various family members and friends, and yes it is just as amazing as it has been described. sorry no pictures were allowed inside :( some of my favorites would have to be the curio box, the ridiculously intricately carved walnut shell + olive stones, and the 17 layered concentric ivory ball. it was amazing just how much chiang-kai shek managed to smuggle over too. three stories of rooms filled with priceless valuables... he must have taken boat upon boat loads. so many things are so fragile though, i wonder if anything was broken along the way.

once again we've gone several hours without food so we need foods again. of course it's still pouring outside, and we're heading to the riverside market... outdoors. all of the drying our shoes just did was for nothing jaja. another thing is that we had been having a lot of trouble finding an atm that would accept our cards... they're really picky here. but we finally found one that would accept all our cards when we got to the riverside, so now we could all have monies :). so we start walking along the river with all the shops, and matt is dead set on finding a whole animal on a stick to eat... something he had been told he had to do by one of the food network shows. well we find squid on a stick, and matt is thrilled. it was certainly a spectacle. i decided to go with quail eggs on a stick instead (taste just like chicken eggs but so much cuter in size)... as swell as some fried squid balls and some of sarah's fried shrimp wraps. only 10 and 20 NT each! so dinner was less than $1! amazing.

the way back to the hotel was probably the most eventful though. everyone was exhausted... even tin-man fell asleep on the subway. so i woke him up at our stop, but when he asked me if i was sure i double checked and the next thing i know he and sarah jayne are outside the subway and the rest of us are getting the doors closed on us. jajaja! so we get off at the next station and wait to see if he's coming to us... nope. so we find our way back to where he was purely by color association. oh my goodness it was funny.

when we finally got back to the hotel all of our feet are soaked and soggy. poor arissa had worn moccasins so not only were her shoes and feet soaked, but her feet had been discolored yellow too. now she was officially asian ;)