Day 3 -- Longshan Temple, Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, Night Market

The adventure continues on day 3.  A little bit later start than yesterday.  We're letting the kids sleep in, and today that meant a 7:30 wake-up.  We ate breakfast, as usual, at the hotel buffet.  It's a mix of "Western" and Chinese food.  For those of you who don't know, for the most part Asian countries don't have the rigid separation of "breakfast foods" and other foods -- the same dishes can be served at any meal of the day (think of "breakfast for dinner" in reverse).  So my breakfast today consisted of the following:  a one-egg omelet with cheese, onion and ham; two mussels with garlic sauce, a taro bun (char siu), one slice of bacon, papaya, and one-half of a doughnut.  Luckily, I have a fairly stable stomach, so this mixing and matching didn't come back to haunt me.

It was raining when we woke up, so we planned to go to the National Palace Museum to see the largest collection of Chinese art and historical artifacts in the world.  The collection rotates, and is so large that it takes something like 23 years for the whole collection to be displayed.  There's a great backstory to the collection -- it was transported around mainland China by the Kuomintang during the Second World War and then during the Chinese Civil War.  When it became clear the Communists were winning, the collection was moved to Taiwan -- and it survived all of these moves entirely intact!  The mainland Chinese occasionally demand that the collection be returned; the Taiwanese in turn remind them that if the collection had been in China during the Cultural Revolution it no doubt would have been destroyed and that Taiwan is a perfectly good place for it to be.  

Anyway, the sun popped out just as we were leaving, so we had a change in plans.  We decided to go to the Longshan Temple a few MRT stops away.  As we were making our way to our local stop, we were blocked by a protest march.  If you look closely at the ribbons on the hats, they say "No Nukes."  This was just one small part of a city-wide protest against nuclear power.  The group was entirely peaceful and marched right on by us (after waiting for the "walk" signal to come up)!

The kids are getting quite good at the MRT.  They figured out our transfer and led the way to Longshan Temple.  The Temple is large, covering a good-sized city block.  It is ornate and lovely, but what struck me is how busy it was as a living, functioning place of worship.  I've been to lots of "touristy" Buddhist temples in my travels, and there are usually a few worshippers and lots of tourists.  Here, the ratios were reversed; there were lots of worshippers and only a few tourists, at least relatively speaking.  Here is a sampling of the photos from the Temple.

Since the weather was holding, but the cloud deck was too low to go up Taipei 101, we decided to go to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial.  It was only a mile or two away, so in our family that meant a hike.  Longshan is in the old part of Taipei and we started our hike by walking through low-slung brick buildings.  Then we crossed a couple of enormous intersections and found ourselves in the government area.  Here are some photos from our walk:

 This last photo shows something that had us puzzled.  If you can't figure it out, it's a trailer pre-positioned outside the Ministry of Education with rolls of razor wire ready to be deployed.  There were also lots of portable barricades -- but no police or soldiers protecting them or even monitoring them.  Later, I figured it out--the polite marchers we saw earlier met up with other marchers and held a scheduled rally in the government area.  The barricades and razor wire were deployed, and to my knowledge the whole thing went off as planned (by both sides) without any injuries.  Maybe the paper will add details tomorrow.

After our trip through the government buildings, we saw our goal -- the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial.  Actually, we didn't know it at the time, but the buildings we saw first were the National Theater and the National Concert Hall -- which are in the same complex as the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial but not technically the same.  All are huge, kind of in a D.C. over-sized sort of way.  It's hard to get an idea of the scale but here are some pictures.

National Theater

 National Concert Hall -- yes, they are twins

 Walking towards the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial

 Then stopping and posing

Looking from the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial back towards the "mall" entrance arches with the National Theater on the left, and the National Concert Hall on the right.

We arrived just in time for the changing of the guard.  It's similar to the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, but much more elaborate and theatrical, and much less an actual military maneuver.  Both are formal and somewhat stylized, but the U.S. version is still clearly recognizable as a military maneuver -- the new guards are marched forward, the weapons are inspected, the guards change, and the old guards march off.  The Taiwanese version has that, but it also lasts about 15 minutes long and it has some elements of a drill team routine to it.  Ah, I'm being picky -- the kids thought it was cool and the guards did a good job.  Here are the pics from inside the memorial.

When we left the memorial, we realized we had walked most of the way back to our hotel, so we just kept going and all enjoyed a mid-afternoon siesta.

Evening came, and out we went again.  This time to the Shilin Night Market -- or at least to the Market area -- we didn't realize until later that there is an actual Market building.  We thought the market stalls in all of the alleyways were the main attraction.  Oh, well, we had fun, and I had the good fortune of stumbling onto a stall selling Thai Rotee -- one of the world's all-time great desserts.  It's basically a crepe, with sliced bananas, condensed milk, and in this case nutella spread over it. There's an egg involved, too, but I think that's just part of the crepe.  Ryan and Jonathan both tried it, and when I asked Ryan if he liked it, he said, "No...I love it!"  Shelley also got a treat...but it was just a crusty dough mixture filled with vegetables.  Good?  Sure.  But it doesn't hold a candle to a Thai Rotee!  (fyi -- I lived in Thailand for about a year in the mid-90's and there was a Rotee vendor outside my buidling).
Again, here are the pics:

After our treats, we stumbled back to the MRT, rode home, walked to our hotel and settled in for the night.  Shelley and I marveled at how the boys are now totally comfortable walking from the MRT stop to the hotel.  It's about five blocks, but it is a landscape that is as foreign to them as can be, and it's taken them all of three days to become accustomed to it.

Which, of course, makes me think of Malia, who is sleeping somewhere in this city as I write this.  In five days, she will be asked to become accustomed to a language, to a people, and then to a landscape that are as foreign to her as Taiwan is to our kids.  It certainly gives one pause when you think of how overwhelming that must be to a little child.