And now for the non-museum portion of our trip to Taiwan….
On Monday, the museum organized a trip for all of us to go to Sun Moon Lake, a beautiful mountain lake in central Taiwan. Our day as tourists started with a boat ride around the lake. The first stop was Lalu Island, or should I say, our first stop was the floating pier around Lalu Island. No human is allowed to step on the island because the aboriginal Taiwanese (Thao) that live in the area believe that it is the dwelling place of their gods, but you can look at it from the pier that surrounds the entire island. Those unfortunate gods living on a tiny island, being gawked at by tourists all day… it’s no Mount Olympus. The boat tour then took us to the Syuanguang Buddhist temple where we enjoyed the view of the lake and snacked on tea eggs (eggs boiled in salty black tea). Our final boat stop was a lakeside village that stretched up the hill from the lake’s shore. We ate guava with plum spice, sipped sweet milk tea and explored the town with Charline, even stopping in to the local Taoist temple where Charline explained the significance of the shrines and sculptures.
After our lunch hour explorations, we all hopped back on the shuttle, which took us to Ci En Pagoda, Chiang Kai-Shek’s memorial to his mother. According to our local guide, Tim, feng shui advisers instructed Chiang Kai-Shek to build the memorial so that it would be 999 feet high, an auspicious number that would give Chiang’s family longevity. The memorial, however, ended up being over 1000 feet high, which supposedly explains the especially bad luck of Chiang’s progeny. Despite the legends of bad karma surrounding this place, we had a great time looking out over the lake from the top of the pagoda and ringing the enormous bell inside of it. Our last two stops of the day were at the Paper Dome, an earthquake memorial building with a roof made entirely out of paper, and a winery that specialized in making Taiwanese sweet rice wine. All in all, it was a great day and ended with a surprise birthday dinner (I’m 30 now!) where I was able to celebrate surrounded by many new friends. I couldn’t have come up with a more memorable way to start the next decade of my life.
On Tuesday, we left Taichung and made our way to Taipei by bus. Lucky for us, Charline is from Taipei and she agreed to accompany us on our journey to the big city. In her usual, but still incredibly generous, way, Charline escorted us to the bus, negotiated buying our tickets, found us a hotel in Taipei and then took us out on the town. She really was our Taiwanese guardian angel.
That first night in Taipei, we went out to the Huaxi Street night market where we wandered the maze of stalls, eating our fill of delicious Taiwanese food including: oyster noodle soup, stir fried greens, crunchy spare rib soup and my favorite… crispy fried dough dipped in a mixture of peanuts that have been boiled in sugary water until the water resembles very sweet milk and the peanuts are so soft you don’t even have to chew them. I LOVE night market. It gave us a way to explore the social, culinary and cultural ways of Taiwan.
On Wednesday, we ventured out in Taipei on our own (Charline had to work, but we assured her that, thanks to her excellent tutelage, we could navigate on our own). After making a stop at a roadside stall for steaming hot, fried dumplings (a common Taiwanese breakfast item), we hopped on the subway to the National Palace Museum. The National Palace Museum houses the largest collection of imperial Chinese art in the world and it was an incredible opportunity to see the thousands of years of Chinese imperial history and art in one place. Needless to say, we pretty much spent the entire day there. Our favorite piece (and one of the museum’s most treasured works) was a piece of jasper that was intricately carved to look exactly like a piece of the Dungpo pork (the stewed pork we gorged ourselves on at that Chinese restaurant in Taichung). What’s not to like about a society whose artistic skills are so advanced that the only new direction they have to go is… life-like carvings of pork!?! After the museum, we managed to feed ourselves without the intervention of an interpreter at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, a la Sushiland in Beaverton. It was just as delightful as Sushiland, with the added bonus of personal hot water spigots for making your own tea. Later that day, we took the subway out to the end of the line (Danshui) and met Charline along the river for some more great eating (fried tofu in tomato sauce, ice cream cone swords and chewy sweet potato donuts) and one last night of her pleasant company.
Thursday was dedicated to another full 24 hours of travel that landed us back in Great Falls, Montana with another killer case of jet lag, but with very happy memories of our first trip to Asia. Our trip would not have been nearly as much fun (and certainly much more stressful) without our amazing interns/interpreters/new friends Charline, Frankie and Ishtar. We hope we get the chance to host them in the U.S. someday, so that we can reciprocate their incredible hospitality. Also, a very special thanks to the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and most especially to Shang Min, Laza and Hsing Yu. And last but not least, thanks to all the other artists in the exhibit who were creative inspiration and super fun to spend time with (Jay and Jodi: hopefully we’ll meet in another intentional community someday, without the time constraints of exhibit set up).
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