Day 3: Tourism In Full
It's not like I've never just
straight up visited a bunch of sites on a trip in a while. But it had been some
time since it was so varied, so numerous, and so solo. I had days like this
last Christmas-time in Israel. There are days defined by one incredible tourism
event like later in that same trip in Petra, or last year in Egpyt. But this
was just wall to wall sightseeing in the purest sense of the word. Going from
site to site, the only respite from seeing sites on your feet being the time it
takes in Taipei's well air-conditioned uber selection.
It was a hectic day to be sure, my
only full day in Taipei as tomorrow I head at 5:45am on a long day-trip tour of
Taroko Gorge National Park. Yesterday I saw a bit but mostly imbibed the spirit
of Taipei as I tried to avoid sleeping. Today was the day; the day that would
to some degree make or break not only my time in Taipei, but far more
importantly how high it could get into my favorite cities ranking. More
seriously, I wanted to see a lot of the city, and blurrily Googled Map'd a
planned itinerary and order that made sense. It was packed. Three different
temples, one main museum, one open square and historical monument, and a meal
and stop at a craft brewery thrown in. All having to end with enough time for me
to have some quick R&R before dinner at MUME at 8:30pm.
Limiting my time was a late start
mostly impacted by a still present dreariness. Anyway, I started off at 9:30,
leaving to get a street-made Chinese Omelette from a well frequented cart a few
blocks from my AirBNB. I didn't really appreciate it at first, but my AirBNB is
really well positioned to a whole host of food options. The omelette was nice,
with a really great sauce that played up an otherwise normally prepared
omelette. Overall, it gave me some sustenance as my day began.
The first stop was the Lungshan
Temple, situated towards the West corner of Taipei. How I know I am not a
professional (or even semi-pro) travel writer is I have no actual interesting
way of describng this temple, especially when compared to the second temple I
visited, other than by saying it was truly spectacular. The paint work and
carving work was great, but better was how they weaved greenery in to the
atmosphere.
As you entered the main courtyard,
past the first of many ornate gates, on either side of you were small ponds,
both replete with Koi. One had a few fountains, the other with a (fake, I'm
assuming) waterfall. The temple in the middle had all the trappings of buddhist
temples, with ornately carved columns, beauitful paintings on woodwork,
ceremonial sconces and pots, and intricately designed golden statuettes. Some
of the distinctive parts of this one was the use of greenery, and also the
inclusion of more traditional Chinese elements (dragons, mostly) - this
knowledge having been gained from overhearing one of the guides.
After taking way too many pictures,
I exited, picked up my Uber and left for the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall and
Gardens. This place is similar to the Chiang Kei-Shek Hall and Gardens I went
to yesterday, if a bit less trafficked. What is nice though is it gives a truly
awesome view of Taipei 101.
I mentioned it yesterday, but it is
still staggering that this building was once the tallest in the world. It
clearly is tall, but to be honest, maybe having been around the slightly taller
Freedom Tower (I refuse to call it One World Trade) a lot has skewed my
perspective. What I do love about Taipei 101 is how much taller it is than
anything else in Taipei - similar actually to the Petronas Towers in Kuala
Lumpur (the building that was the tallest until Taipei 101 was built). The view
of that tower truly showed its regality from the open square.
The Sun-Yat-Sen Memorial Hall
itself was a bit more simple than the one for Chiang Kei-Shek, but also a bit
more informative, doubling as a mini-musuem of Taiwan's history in teh guise of
being a history of his life. That Taipei can have two of these large, giant,
open squares deep in teh heard of its city shows again truly how well designed
Taipei is, never feeling overcrowded and busy.
From there was lunch, with me
slightly delayed after going first to the wrong place as when you put
Sun-Yat-Sen Memorial Hall in Google, for some reason it pulls up the wrong
place. Anyway, I still reached my intended destination of Yongkan Beef Noodle
by 12:15. Sadly, due to a combination of a line when I got there (it is very
famous for being a truly reliable beef noodle spot, though from what I've read
not necessarily better than others) and the fact they took a strangely long
time to serve me. I have a suspicion it was due to me being one of the three
foreigners there. I shared a three-person table with a couple who came about a
minute after me. They got served first and ate and left before I got my beef
noodle soup. The next group came and got served first. Again, I can only
speculate. Either way, the food came, and it was very good. It was truly tender
beef , and the soup was really tasty without being overly spicy.
After lunch, I was running a bit
behind with three different places to check off my list. The next stop was the
second temple, which ended up being a weird diverted visited. The palce I
wanted to go to was the Confucius Temple, which when I arrived I realized was
closed on Monday's (yeah, I should have looked this up). Anyway, right next
door was the Dalongdong Temple, which was quite good itself. Weirdly, across
the street from that temple was another temple, but that was closed from teh
moment. This apparently was a pretty spiritual area.
The Dalongdong temple that I
visited was a lot like the Lungshan Temple in its set-up, but slightly
different in its style. Instead of great carving, it had better paintings. It
also had more open space, as the Lungshang temple tried to pack a whole hell of
a lot into a pretty small space. The actual most interior area was a little
more ornate as well. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to catch the Confucius Temple
tomorrow after my tour ends, but as of now this was a nice little haven deep
inside the heart of Taipei.
After the Confucius Temple I went
to the one step that had the potential to really mess with my scheduled
itinerary, Taipei's National Palace Museum, a sprawling museum showcasing
Chinese art from the earliest dynastic days. The collection shares some ties
with teh Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing, though I am a bit
unclear on how the connection works.
The museum itself was really nice.
I appreciated that it wasn't overbearing, with just as much information as
required, with each case inside each exhibit nicely built, without too many
objects, vases, plates, manuscripts or the rest. Ostensibly this is an art
museum, but in reality it serves as a history museum for dynastic China, but
told through usable art - basically no paintings or portraits. It was an
interesting decision, one that I enjoyed because seeing jade curios, or
perfectly round ceramic vases delicately detailed was a lot better than just
seeing some random paintings.
The museum took a long time to
complete, though it could have taken longer had I gone for the audioguide. I do
regret not getting guides, be it here, or more detrimentally at the temples, as
not having a guide really lessens the educational value of those places. I know
loosely the story of each temple, and have a truly limited understanding of
China's (and more importantly Taiwan's) complicated history. Then again, given
I have limited time, it makes sense to wait for a longer trip to the Mainland
to flesh that part out more.
After the museum, my tourism
portion of the day ended at the one site the furthest out from the heart of the
city, the Guandu Temple built near the ocean, onto a cliff. It is a tightly
built three-story structure, with little bits of brilliance in all three. It
had the familiar: the courtyard, the reliefs, the carvings, the incense pots,
the obscenely gold-repleted inner sanctums. But also it had a bunch of teh new:
the tunnel leading form the main area, right through the hill behind, leading
to a buddha statue in a little alcove with a sea view; or the area in teh back
on the hill where you get an amazing view of the temple below it - including a
massive frieze - and a second level with even more lavish inner sanctums. This
truly was the most unique and to me most beautiful of the temples I saw today,
so I was glad I had saved it for last.
Finally heading back to the main
area, I went to one of Taipei's other craft breweries that seemed fairly
reasonable. This one was called ZhangMen; their central outpost being a small
beer bar right int eh center of the city - in fact a couple blocks away
from the Din Tai Fung restaurant I had went to yesterday. The beer was good –
as was their happy hour deal of 50% off. I quickly decided that I would try to
go back at least one more time, this place being a great little find with the
perfect atmosphere of awesome beer and an interesting (mostly foreigner) crowd.
For dinner, I got to experience the
one true splurgy dinner I will have on this trip. MUME restaurant in Taipei is
listed as one of the city’s best, but has a fairly affordable (for Taiwan, for fancy
restaurants) tasting menu of seven courses for around $80, not including
drinks/tips/etc. The set-up was clean, tidy and modern. My favorite aspects
might have been the menu and all cutlery kept in a little drawer built into the
table.
The food was excellent. The place displays
itself as having a more European cuisine, but the food served was more Asian in
ingredients and all locally sourced. I’m usually not one to really care about ‘locally
sourced’ ingredients but having that be a distinction in rural American is a
lot different than Taiwan in generating excitement.
The courses are a bit hard to fully
describe, especially because I am fully aware that this is a very long post so
far. The first was a play on a tomato gazpacho featuring prawn. Second was a
tuna crudo with daikon radish and some other Asian flavors on top and below.
Third was maybe my favorite dish, a wagyu beef tartare with radish, egg, and a
tortilla-style cracker to scoop it up with. Fourth was a sourdough bread, baked
piping hot, which could be doubled as a scooper for the tartare and the dish to
come. The dish to come was a ‘milkfish’ that was braised (didn’t realize you
could do that with a fish, but man was it great and soft) with a delicious sauce
and further Taiwanese greens. The last main was an ox tongue (way better than
any other tongue I’ve had) with mushrooms and a shiitake dashi. The desert was
a kaffir lime & coconut dried ice mixed with mango and orange. It was all
great. It was all modern. It was all so fresh. MUME was amazing.
After dinner, I finished the night
a Wa-Shu, an admittedly Japanese-inspired cocktail bar – though the cocktail
makers are quick to confirm they are indeed Taiwanese. They have the normal
list of cool cocktails, but the better angle for them is to pick a flavor, or a
fruit, or a spice, and they’ll make a cocktail off of that. The coolest was
probably a whiskey-based cocktail that came off of the pick of ‘peanut butter’.
Apparently, they mix peanut butter and whiskey (a 1:4 ratio), and then seep it
through a coffee filter. The result is way better than you would expect.
I had to call it a night relatively
early (~1:00am) because I have to get up to catch the start of the Taroko Gorge
tour at 5:45 tomorrow – of course, the first three or so hours of the tour will
be being on a train. Overall, my impression of Taipei is it is a fabulous
tourism city. It is not missing anything you would want. It has a good mass
transit system, low traffic, great sites all interspersed with the rest of the
city, decent enough food (this is the one area it is probably a bit worse than,
say, Bangkok or other East Asian cities). The best positive though might be the
weather. Certainly it has its rainy season, but it is less pronounced than
other areas, and the non-rainy season is far, far, far more pleasant than the
humidity pits of a Singapore or Bangkok. Other than maybe Tokyo, I haven’t been
to an East Asian city with this good weather.
On the whole, Taipei has been
fantastic so far, and I do hope I can extend that to ‘Taiwan’ being fantastic when
I venture out for half a day tomorrow. Very soon I will be on my way to the
third world (regardless of how relatively developed Ho Chi Minh or Hanoi are)
and heat and humidity and rain and the rest), so I may very quickly long for
these days.
