National Palace Museum

5/11

Got up at a reasonable time, but didn't get out until about 1 p.m. because I had to do my laundry and go to the train station to get my discount youth pass (free and in the form of a cool luggage tag!) and buy a train ticket for tomorrow before leaving to go to Shilin, where the National Palace Museum was.  I got to the right subway station, but couldn't find the bus I wanted for the life of me.  I did however, see a place making something described as Chinese Pizza (though it was nothing at all like pizza), which were incredibly good.  I still don't know what they're called, but it was basically a very airy bread with green onions, seemingly strings of wheat wound together, with an amazing lightness, then an egg, tons of basil (not sure if it was thai basil, but definitely not italian), pepper and a bit of soy sauce.  It was about $1 and so good that later, on my way back, I got another one.

So I walked around, asked someone who gave me particularly heinous directions, but eventually found a sign that had the right number and color.  I didn't actually arrive at the museum until about 3:20 so I didn't have tons of time, since they closed at 5.  It's a very nice, clean museum and some of the collection was incredible.  Unfortunately, so much of it was boring that I felt it really detracted and overwhelmed the worthwhile bits.  I actually feel this way about museums often, that they just need to edit their collections better: charge the same price but show half the stuff.  Perhaps you're thinking "But Laura, everyone has different tastes- you can't know what everyone will like."  This is true, but if it looks like something I could buy at IKEA, I don't care how old it is, it should be kept for admiration by pottery scholars. 

Like I said, though, some of it was very nice.  They had interesting sections on border maps that were just declassified in 2007 (though for some reason these descriptions were only in Chinese), some of the pottery, some paintings and some truly incredible curio boxes and ivory and wood carvings.  It was definitely worth my time, but maybe not more than the 1.4 or so hours I put in.  Another interesting section was their calligraphy collection which started to explain the different meanings of particular brush strokes and why it's so much more important in Eastern culture.  It's something I'd really like to learn more about and might take a class on in China.

I felt quite tired after catching the bus back to the station, so just did a brief tour around what I thought was the Shilin Night Market.  As it turns out, it wasn't, but after enough time, most markets seem to look the same.  Even after discovering that I hadn't been at the right place, I just didn't feel like going over to the other so I just went back to my hostel and chilled out for the rest of the night.