National Palace Museum (gardens)

Taipei is famous for its nightmarkets, and I finally dipped my toe in. The one we went to was one of the smaller ones, and we visited on a weekday, so it wasn't too overwhelming.

I'm not sure what these little spheres were but they were delicious

We stopped by a shaved ice stand, where you could pick out a bowl full of toppings and then get a mountain of shaved ice dumped on top of the bowl.

this blows yogurtland out of the water

GIANT shaved ice and syrup refills are only 5NT (about 15 cents)

It's a lot of shaved ice.

We also got a dragonfruit, which is even brighter than this picture would indicate.

fried rice covered with an egg

In the past week, we've made two separate trips to the National Palace Museum. On Wednesday, we arrived at 5pm, because we heard that there was a reduced ticket price after 4:30. But apparently the museum closes at 6:30 on Wednesdays instead of 9pm as we originally thought. We decided to come back (a third time) when we'd have more time to look at the museum. Instead, we wandered around the gardens next to the museum.

The gardens were really beautiful, so I wasn't too bummed about failing to see the museum a second time.

In the middle of the gardens, there was a giant koi pond.

There was also a pavilion, which provided some much-needed shade.

A table and stools made out of one tree

i got bitten by mosquitoes about 9872352 times here

cluck cluck

Some statues. Andrew says fishermen used birds to catch fish.

The waterfalls were all human-made, but still beautiful!

I'm smiling because I don't realize a thousand mosquitoes are feasting on my flesh

On the second floor of the pavilion there was a guqin,
a seven-stringed instrument. We did not play it.

My favorite part of the gardens was the koi pond.

Mak (and anyone else who does not like to see pictures of fish), do a control + f for "***" to skip past the fish part of my blog post!

At first, we didn't even realize there were fish in the pond, although it should have been obvious from the vending machines that sold fish food.

But then, some teenagers started feeding them, and suddenly they were everywhere.

very eager koi

feed me

hello birds

 They were so large and happy, how could I resist? Fish food was only 10NT (30 cents).

The fact that anyone can buy fish food made me wonder if the koi are on a regular feeding schedule, and how the museum can make sure all of them get the same amount of food.

I really hope that koi aren't the kind of fish that can die from overeating, because they really went to town on our little pellets.

glub glob, put pellets in our giant mouths

Pictures don't do it justice, so here's a video. (ft andrew lying to me that they are goldfish)

Occasionally, one koi would be so eager to get food it would swim on top of the other koi and end up momentarily stuck out of the water on top of the others like it was crowdsurfing.

***END OF FISH


Eventually, we ran out of fish food, and because we'd already explored the gardens, we decided to leave.

I probably would have bought more fish food, but Andrew correctly identified my plan to feed the fish for an hour as ridiculous.

"hey, what do you think this emergency button does?"

we wanted to see how close you could get to the koi without falling in

That was mostly it for the gardens. On Friday we visited the actual museum (from 4:30 to 9), which doesn't allow inside photographs. So all I have for you is this picture of the outside steps.

The museum had a lot of cool Chinese history. Most of the collection is stuff that the KMT absconded with when they fled China in 1949. There's a piece of jade carved to look like a cabbage, which the museum is very proud of (the gift shop was 1/3 cabbage paraphernalia). 

Oh, and on Friday we also went back to the gardens to fed the fish again. It's totally normal and not an obsession because it was two separate visits.