Day 4/5: Exploring Taipei
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Taipei is a great city to explore, transportation is very convenient via it’s MRT (subway) and for the most part the streets are pedestrian friendly. In a place like Hanoi or Bangkok, sidewalks are just glorified scooter parking lots and walking around is not very enjoyable. In Taipei, the road is wide enough to accommodate scooter parking and pedestrians.
I started off by exploring the National Palace Museum, which has one of the best Chinese art collections in the world. During the cultural revolution on the mainland, they destroyed art work sadly. Some of the ancient Chinese art survived since it was transported to Taiwan, and much of it is housed at the museum. No pictures are allowed inside, but the main types of work was art out of jade, bronze and many very finely painted pictures on scrolls. The place was tour group central and quite crowded, but still enjoyable to see.
Since I already saw Taipei 101 from the top, I decided to do a short hiking trail to get a view of Taipei 101 and the rest of Taipei. Unfortunately the weather was cloudy/rainy for the duration of my stay in Taipei. The rain never really got heavy, it would just occasionally start very lightly raining and remain quite cloudy all day. The hiking trail was a ~250m ascent and was a pretty easy staircase.
Taipei, a little bit cloudy
Under Taipei 101, there was a good food court where most of the shops had plastic versions of their meals on display. When you can’t speak or read Chinese, it’s incredibly helpful to be able to point to something to order it. There was a place that cooked meals on hot iron slabs, so for ~$5 I ended up with this:
Overall Taipei is a great place to visit, but the real beauty of Taiwan is outside of the major cities.