Dec. 19: Ju Ming Museum

Along with Dandrich's parents we took a short road trip to Taipei to visit an art museum in the mountains. It is always fun to drive around outside of the city to see what life looks like in the country. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of that.

Before we left Taipei we stopped at Costco and picked up food for a picnic at the museum. We got a huge platter of assorted sushi and another of just salmon sushi. Once we arrived at the museum we ate lunch on a little flooding pavilion. The food was delicious and the setting was pretty as well.

The museum was pretty awesome. Ju Ming is a sculptor from Taiwan. His most famous work is a series of sculptures in Taichi poses but he has a lot of other pieces as well. What is really interesting about his work is how, although the pieces are somewhat abstract, he uses the cuts in the wood to really express the emotions that go along with the subject.

Ju Ming also has a lot of sculptures that are first cut out of Styrofoam before a mold is made and filled with bronze. It makes the pieces look really interesting.

In the evening we walked around and took some more pictures of the area near where Dandrich's parents live. The shopping area is all decorated for Christmas even though few people celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. No one even gets the day off work or school. Instead most people celebrate the day more like a Valentine's Day. Regardless, people are really psyched to decorate for Christmas (or X'mas as everyone here calls it) and wear Santa hats and reindeer antlers.

Dec. 17: National Palace Museum

The National Palace Museum is my favorite tourist destination in Taipei. It has the best collection of Chinese art and antiquities. The museum also has a pretty interesting history in itself. As the Communists fought to take over China, Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists packed up the best pieces and rarest items from the National Museum in China and removed the artifacts to Taiwan. 

Unfortunately, you aren't allowed to take pictures inside the museum so I don't have any from the exhibits. The permanent exhibits include a large number of Chinese paintings and calligraphy as well as priceless jade pieces among others. One of the most famous pieces in the museum is a piece of jade carved like a cabbage. Besides being a fairly large piece of jade, the artist also used the natural color of the jade to mimic the different colors in a cabbage. So the top is a dark green and fades to white on the bottom. 

Recently, China reconnected direct flights from mainland China to Taiwan so now there are a ton of Chinese tourists all over the city. The National Palace Museum most be a stopping point for every tour group because the place was infested with Chinese tourists. We did have a nice lunch at the restaurant near the museum that served dim sum. The museum also had a visiting exhibits of ancient Greek sculpture and pottery on loan from the British Museum. 

Dim Sum

That evening, we walked around the city with Dandrich's parents and ate some traditional Taiwanese dishes. One of the more famous dishes is called blood and cake and it is almost exactly what it sounds like: rice mixed with blood formed into a bar. Apparently it is banned in the United States. One of the strangest differences between American culture and Taiwanese culture is that unlike during meals at home, people here don't always have drinks with their dinners. The restaurants seem to be about split on whether they serve hot tea or not and it is unusual to see people with other drinks unless they are eating at American restaurants or expensive restaurants. 

Taiwanese blood cake 

Street vendors in Taipei