RS's travels: Taipei National Palace Museum

Mom and I, both utterly exhausted and very out of it, felt that we needed to get out on our first day and go to the National Palace Museum, where there is the world's largest collection of Chinese artifacts. In order to get there, we had to figure out where the metro station was close to our "dorm room" and then find what stop to get off at and then what bus to take to get to the museum. Not an easy task when no one speaks english and all of the signs are in Chinese! Luckily, we have some nice Taiwan books and both mom and I have a good sense of direction and can read a subway map! So we made it into the metro station and after looking at several maps and finally deciding which direction we needed to go, we found our track and got onto the train. We took the subway to Shilin stop and got off and somehow made our way our of the station to the bus stop, where we found two buses that we could take to get to the museum. After about 15 minutes of waiting (and almost hailing a taxi because we were not sure the bus was coming), the correct bus arrived, we tried to ask the bus driver if it was the correct bus and he just shook his head and we got on anyway. After a nice 10 minute ride, we arrived at the Museum. We decided that we would get an English audio so we could get some explanation of the pieces and then we had to check our bags. There were so many asian tourists on tours that it felt like we could have been at a tourist destination anywhere in the world. Overall, the museum was nice- one of the main things that interested mom and myself was the difference of art between all of the dynasties. Mom's favorites were the Song and the Yuan Dynasties. There were more simplistic of all of the art work. We also saw the famous Jadetite Cabbage, with a grasshopper hidden in the leaves, and some amazing tiny, tiny pieces of carved wood that were a "meat shaped stone" and a carved olive stone boat. We spent about 4.5 hours in the museum walking around and then went to the garden outside the museum to explore. It started to rain a bit while we were out there, but it was very nice and resembled a Japanese garden, even equipped with many carp. We were so exhausted and hadn't eaten anything all day so we decided it was time to head home. We found our way back via the bus and the metro and are now waiting for dad to come home from teaching all day at the hospital with some dinner! hopefully we will adjust to the time zone too, because we feel very loopy and a bit out of it. This was the perfect adventure for the first day of the trip.