Temple Day

Hear that? Silence. The sound of my brain not exploding. No barfing, no two-hour detours, no battling the sun for daylight. Just some pre-arranged and relatively easy-to-find activities. Ahhh.

While on any other day I might consider myself a wimp, today I was just plain tired. I still had misgivings about the subway (not because it did anything to me, just the Freudian association) and I have been going a million miles an hour every weekend since I got here. If I were home in the states, it would be a day of a recovery ride, brunch, and a movie in my adidas yoga pants all day. But alas, I'm not in the states, nor do I have a ride, brunch, or any movies. So I needed a plan B.

I used today to finish what I didn't get to last weekend, and it took pretty much the whole day. And thankfully, they all used one MRT station--Yuanshan--as a home base. How lovely is that?

The first stop was two temples, the Confucius Temple and Bao-an Temple, which happened to be located right next to each other. These rounded out the three must-see temples of Taipei, according to various traveler sites (Longshan being the third and most famous, which I already visited). They are all just beautiful. I wanted to take so many pictures, and I did take quite a few, although I waited for the rooms to be empty. I don't know if it really mattered or not, but I didn't know if it was sacriligeous or something, and even if it wasn't, do you really want some round-eyed tourist photographing everything when you're bowing to the beings who you revere as more important than life itself? Most likely not.

Main Confucius Temple building.

One of many temple artifacts.

I'm not sure what this is for, but it's pretty anyhow.

Same as above.

Bao-an Temple entrance.

The main temple building in the middle of the courtyard.

Another view of the architecture.

Ceiling artwork.

Paintings on the side and engravings on the pillars.

One of the many places of worship.

On the way back from the temples. More silly signage.

After the Confucius and Bao-An temples, I made my way to the Lin An-tai Ancestral House. This was actually kind of a haul, even though I had a map, because there was no simple way to get there. (It's times like these I really appreciate the boring grid streets of Turlock and the like.) I tried to stick to the main roads, because after my experience from last weekend, trying to take shotcuts through the alleys and short roads just isn't an option. From what I had read, I was expecting something large and grand. It was interesting, just because I like history, but was it some grand attraction that I would have regretted if I missed? Eh, not really, but since I was there, I took a walk-through and looked at all the artifacts anyway. I like learning about the history anyway, even if the building isn't spectacular, so it was still worth it.

Frontal view of Lin An-tai mansion.

Side shot. The brick building is the main house, while the white building is the study, where the children's education took place.

Anyone for Torrey repeats?

Bamboo sticks. I can't paraphrase. You have to read the original description below.

This might need magnification.

Following Lin An-tai, I made my way over to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. It was only about 4:30, and I knew the museum has extended hours and free admission on Saturday nights starting at 5:30. I wanted to get in free, but was very tired and didn't want to wait, and didn't have anything to do for an hour. Then I told myself, 'Shannon, you moron, admission is less than $1. What's your deal?' I have gotten so into the mindset of 'free trumps everything' that my common sense transiently left me. It's back now, however, so you can breathe a sigh of relief.

I stayed in the museum quite longer than I had planned, and there were some absolute amazing exhibits, ranging from photography to oil canvas to watercolors. There was this one artist by the name of Kuo Wei-Kuo whose work kind of tripped me out (the picture in the link is one of his more 'mainstream' pieces), but hey, art is subjective, so who am I to judge? I did really like the artist Wuyung Hsu and his oil canvas pieces which reflected not only differing regions throughout Taiwan, but throughout the entire world as well.

On the bottom floor of the museum, there was a giant book sale, and I know I couldn't resist, so I didn't even try. I thought I would be off the hook because pretty much everything was in Chinese, but as I started to leave this one book of photography--THE perfect coffee table book for my non-existent coffee table--called to me. I was drawn to it and very tempted, although the retail price was over $60 US, about $2100NT. I liked it so much that I considered paying the full price, but then decided I would go look it up on amazon.com instead and buy it that way (which, by the way, has it for $37.99 with free shipping). But since all these books were all out on carts in the plaza, they were on deep discount. I fumbled through the back to see $800NT ($23 US) marked. I thought that this was surely an error, so I asked the cashier, and she confirmed the price at $800. Score! It was the last one, which may be why it was on discount, without any scratches, tears, bent pages, or anything. It was perfect, and now it's mine.

Museum sign. You could probably guess that on your own.

After the museum I was rather exhausted and decided to make my way home. While I didn't argue with any old ladies over prices, climb thousands of feet, or ride any motorcycles, I did accomplish some things (although more mellow) and that's just fine with me.