We wake up in our villa at 6. Luckily, Olga feels like herself again and the rest of the family did not get sick. We have breakfast and pack our bags, Olga tears another trouser, and we leave the appartement at 9.45.
We aim to take the train to Taipei at 11, but reserving the tickets and buying lunch takes longer then expected. We’re on the platform five minutes before departure time. All in all, excellent timing.
It’s another 1H45 minute train ride and Zeno finally falls asleep 30 minutes before arrival. When we exit the train, we immidiately feel the great difference in the weather compared to Tainan. It’s probably as hot, but the air is much dryer in Taipei, so it feels much better. There is even a breeze!
Our appartement is close to the train station, but as we have so much luggage, we order an uber. We wait and wait, but the taxi is not coming closer, so we cancel the ride an order another one. By the time we could have walked to the appartement, the uber is finally arriving.
Our appartement is on the 11th floor of a building in the very center of Taipei. It’s small, a studio, but bigger than a standard hotel room and with a small kitchen for breakfast. There is a bath and many stuffed animals, so the children are happy.
We go out straight away to see a bit of Taipei, we walk to the nearby metro station and take the metro to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. It lies on the far end of Liberty square, which seems to be built to replace Tiananmen square in Beijing as it’s flanked with to palace like buildings housing the national theatre and national concert hall. The memorial hall was built to honor Chiang Kai-Shek after his death in 1975.
It’s an enormous octagonal building, pretty from the outside but ugly inside, the main hall on the fourth floor houses a huge bronze statue of Chiang and is guarded by an honor guard which changes every hour. The lower floor houses exhibitions rooms, class rooms, a bank, a post office and many restaurants so it’s not very focused on what it wants to be. This is possibly due to the fact that Taiwan has changed into a democracy and left the old days of the KMT behind.
We walk through the park and buy some fish food from a machine, so the children can feed the fish. They have a lot of fun although Zeno is mostly focused on the birds which also flock to the food.
Nearby is the 228 Peace park, where protesters took over a radio station in 1947 protesting the harsh treatment of the natives of the island. This triggered 2 years of reprisals and white terror by the KMT. Cleo hears a singer in the park and wants to sit down and listen. Afterwards we go to the National Museum in the park. The ground floor has an exhibition on bird migration in Taiwan so Zeno is excited. Downstairs is a children’s museum so Cleo is really happy too. The upstairs galleries exhibit native art and gives a bit of information on the different native ethnic groups who still live on the island. They were here before the Chinese, Spanish, Dutch and Japanese and still form a minority groups in the eastern part of the island.
Our ticket is also valid for the national museum across the road in an old bank, this has some dinosaur skeletons. So we drag a crying Cleo from the children museum which ends when she sees the dinosaurs. She is very excited but gets sad again when we tell her the museum is closing and we have to go.
We found a vegetarian restaurant just around the corner which should open at 17.00. But when we arrive there the lights are out and it doesn’t look like it will open soon. So we chose kaiten sushi instead, in our two times in Japan we have never tried the conveyor belt type restaurants so this is a first.
The children love it and want to get everything from the conveyor belt. Cleo loves all the food, Zeno not as much. For every five plates you return you get a lucky draw with a prize. Our luck holds and the machine above our head spits out a ball with a toy inside, making this Cleo’s favourite restaurant. We try it two more times but no more luck. We head home with the metro and get ready for bed, it was a long day.
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