day14: national palace museum, gong guan

friday, 4/11/2008:

friday morning i noticed my cousin had these marshmallows that were pudding flavored and had a filling!! i ate 1/3 of the bag...hehe.

after the long day on thursday, friday was another late start to the day. by the time my cousin and i got out the door, it was quickly approaching noon. we wanted to accomplish two things that day before 5pm: 1) national palace museum, and 2) go to the area near taipei train station for some shopping.

in our rush to accomplish these two tasks, it didn't occur to us to have lunch before going to the national palace museum. touring the museum was nice, lots of old stuff, mostly replicas, but our time there can only be described in one word: hungry. i guess 1/3 bag of pudding marshmallows was not enough to sustain me. by about 4pm, my cousin and i were at our limit. (it's not that i have to have meals so regularly, it's that the national palace museum wasn't sufficient to keep my mind off of hunger. okay i admit it, i'm not the most patient for museums.)

my cousin took me to this amazing sizzling steak dinner for only 180NT ($6). the restaurant, "da kuai" (big piece), is a chain, and was very modest. the steak was delicious, but the corn soup was pretty not delicious. the steak, 3 pieces of tender (and fatty) steak, came out on a sizzling platter with some pasta and mixed vegetables (pasta and veggies were pretty boring) and an egg cracked onto the the hot plate. the egg is a little excessive? but admittedly delicious. they also had melon soda and apple soda! which at first sounded really good, but turns out is more novel than tasty. and then we didn't have time to go shopping near taipei train station, since at the national palace museum we had decided it was better to do the national palace museum trip well than to do both the museum and the shopping but only half well for both.

after dinner, my cousin had to go meet up with her boyfriend, so i decided to go back to the gong guan area outside of national taiwan university to do some shopping. as i was walking by the ntu campus, i noticed a double decker row of VERY neatly organized bicycles (picture)! the double decker bicycle rack was accompanied by a sign with diagrammed instructions (which seemed like they might be much needed!). i guess even though bikes are small, space is still a premium. again most, if not all, of my purchases in the gong guan area were earrings. there was one vendor, a woman right outside of the face shop, who sells very good silver earrings. i had bought two pairs of earrings from her the week before when shopping in the area with my uncle, but then bought four more pairs this time! walking along the street i saw another vendor with similar earrings. turns out the two women are basically the same, but have separated to two spots. i bought two more pairs from her! and then a few more pairs of earrings later, my friend bonnie came to meet me at the gong guan mrt stop around 8:30pm. bonnie is my taiwan indie music exchanging buddy! we had planned on having dinner together, but i was still incredibly full from that steak, so we went to a japanese restaurant, where she had dinner, and i had this really good baked sweet potato cake topped with ice cream and red beans. bonnie and i parted at the mrt stop and i went back home to shilin. on the walk back home from the mrt station, i went to the convenience store to buy a yangleduo. they usually come in these tiny 2 inch high bottles and you always drink a few but never feel it is enough, but this time i decided, if i'm going to drink yangleduo, i'm going to drink yangleduo! so i bought a huge bottle! hehe.

full set of pictures at picasa!