Went to this place called National Palace Museum, known in Chinese as Gùgōng, last saturday, and that was about 2nd of January.

In the world, there are two Gùgōng. One is in Taipei and is the one I visited, another is located in Beijing and is, essentially, the forbidden city. Originally, all of the artifacts that can be viewed in both of those were originally collected in The Forbidden City in Beijing, which had been the throne of chinese emperors for many generations, and in the beginning of the 20th century had turned into a museum institution.

Some of the best pieces of art were eventually relocated to different parts of China and then, finally to Taiwan, because of the cultural revolution in China, where people were "breaking down the four olds, setting up the four news", the olds being old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. It was basically what inspired Hitler to kill all intellectuals and burn any paintings and books that he didn't particularly like. It's the exact same story.

Essentially, Taiwan is Chian-Kain Sheks attempt at preserving the old as it were before the cultural revolution, so Taipei Gùgōng is the place where a signifficant part of Chinas cultural heredity is kept. Not a very big part of it, as that is a quite extensive size, but still quite noteworthy.

As you can see, so far, I haven't shown any photos. I only took photos outside of the museum, so you'll have to go there yourself if you want to have a look. (It's dirt cheap though. 150 NT$ for a normal ticket, and 80 NT$ if you're a student.

There are still pictures on the internet that you can use, of course.
This is the Jadeite Cabbage, which is one of the museums biggest treasures. People around these parts have been much affectionate towards jade for a long time, and you will often see jade sold as souvenirs, and that's anywhere. Be it in Taipei 101, a night market, or in the Wulaian mountains. Picture is taken from wikipedia by the user peelden.

Quite typically there's only some sculpture of pig meat. This one rock is made by nature. Only the right cutting has made it look so similar to a cooked piece of pig meat of exactly the style, that the people eat almost every single day here. Even I can smell the sweet and greasy fragrance radiating from a bowl of cooking pig meat from looking at this item.
I didn't even get to see this one myself, actually. Just saw a copy in the souvenir shop as my host sister told me about it. But from the looks it seems pretty legit. Also found on wikipedia and taken by Asiir.

Can you read those golden chinese characters? I think I have an idea of the pronuncation, but I don't really get the meaning.

On the opposite side of the road, there's a big apartment complex, seemingly in the middle of nowhere if you look apart from a few mountain dwellings and the Palace Museum.

Afterwards I went and ate Japanese food with Maxine. And that was all on the second day of the year.

Allow me to be a little achronological again today. I'll get back to the stuff I missed the past week.

Went for some karaoke again today. A big KTV hotel it was. As you can see, all my friends are rotaract now.

A bunch of strange stuff was going on that I didn't get too deep into as I am still not exactly fluent in Chinese. Seems like fun though. I heard lots of "不要不要!", when the guy had to kiss a girl on the cheek.

We sang a bunch of songs, mostly chinese. Surprisingly many english songs were available, but surprisingly many of them are some that I've never heard of. I could sing as many as was needed though, which were not many, as others were quite eager to sing chinese.

Later I went with some of my older homies from rotary to an expensive japanese restaurant in Sheraton Taipei Hotel that I walk by every day when I go to school. It's appareantly a much bigger place than it looks like from the main street. Got lots of large stuff I didn't take pictures of unfortunately.

But I did manage to snap a few pics of the food there. It doesn't look as good as it tastes, actually. A meal almost interely consisting of raw fish, miso soup and other stuff that your stomach can accept really easy. Too bad it's overly expensive, otherwise I could go there instead of eating lunch at school 10mins away.

Japanese green tea and japanese 'alcohol', also known as sake, (in chinese it's not called wine, it's just alcohol. For example red alcohol, beer alcohol, apple alcohol...)

Finally, saw this when I got home. Then I smiled, took a bath, wrote a blogpost and went to bed.

Lol. So much stuff has happened that I have lost track of time.

 

 

Let's just make this clear, Nathalie: I now have Mizo Soup, Suhsi (well, not like I haven't tasted every major variant from home already), udon noodles and oyster omelette. The first three are quite famous Japanese dishes I believe? ;) You can't see the oyster omelette here, but I promise you: all four are really good. Especially noodles and sushi. Yum.