At 06:40 I picked up the phone closest to my bed (there are three in the room, including one next to the toilet): "This is morning call!" the female, Asian computer announced. I tried to hang up the phone but missed the receiver, so the phone dangled by the bed while I reached for my cell phone to confirm the horrible reality. I've since gotten used to these wake-up calls.
After the most ridiculously awesome breakfast buffet you could imagine, which I'm yet to take a picture of, we boarded another Chinatown Express-like bus for National Taiwan University at 8:00AM. I'm not kidding when I say that every single bus has a karaoke machine on it. I'm also not kidding when I say that karaoke, to Mandarin pop songs no less, is the worst possible thing when you are trying to snooze for 30 minutes before starting a 12 hour day of walking around a city so humid you could swim from place to place.
Taiwan National University, or NTU, is beautiful. Palm trees line all the streets, and tropical sequoia-like trees that have air-roots are placed in huge beds. The cool thing about these trees is that the air-roots, which are intended to absorb moisture, become another extension of the tree when they make contact of the ground. The trees then begin to take on the appearance of those that you see in movies growing around Asian temples. Truly beautiful, and very commonplace. Gotta love the tropical climates.
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| From Taiwan 2010 |
Here's a shot of the group under one of those cool trees I was talking about.
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| From Taiwan 2010 |
One element of the campus tour was visiting the major academic departments, to include a zoology museum. We listened to a presentation on different animal sounds, and then a student casually produced a box containing foam/caulk stuffed rats. Their tails served nicely as handles.
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| From Taiwan 2010 |
We also saw a presentation on the history of their physics department, which included one of the first particle accelerators in Asia (pictured below). Clearly, NTU has been at the forefront of education in East Asia for quite some time.
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| From Taiwan 2010 |
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| From Taiwan 2010 |
After the campus tour, we traveled to the National Palace Museum. This is the place where the retreated Republican forces, who were fleeing the Communists following successive defeats in the Chinese Civil War (post WWII), stored a large majority of the treasures from mainland China. They saved thousands of artifacts and pieces of art that represented the entire span of the regions history from the Communists. This turned out to be a huge save later on: during Mao's Cultural Revolution, young Maoists destroyed ancient temples and treasures in their fervor to shun the old and welcome in progress. In a way, the existence of the museum is sad. It was founded by the exiled Republic of China government to store the treasures until they could return to the mainland. They're still there today, representing both the care of the Republicans and the irreverence of the Communists. Pictures weren't allowed inside the museum.
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| From Taiwan 2010 |
After the walkthrough of the museum, which was quite long, we headed back to our hotel. I quickly donned my complimentary bathrobe, flipped on Animal Planet and listened to a documentary on meerkats interspersed with incredibly loud and raucous Taiwanese commercials (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGxgmwCuKN4).
Hard sleep followed. Life is good.
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| From Taiwan 2010 |
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