Mountains of Disappointment, I call this entry.

My quest to climb a bunch of hills continues, this time towards the south end of town. I arrived at the MRT station and set out, GPS in hand, to climb Chanchu Mountain. My heart sank when it appeared I was in another light industry part of town. Great, I thought. This was going to be like Nangang. If there is a trail, its blocked by some factory put up last week. My heart rose a little when the industry suddenly gave way to a really nice park in a residential area. Once more, they had a map with the hiking trail marked. Ah, a lucky day for me! I glanced up and saw a bunch of electrical towers and substations near the summit, but at least I could get my hiking in.

Xizikou Summit, with the 101 in the background

Nope. The trail doesn't exist. There's a marker for where it WILL start, with construction tape around it. I saw another entrance on the GPS, so after a 30 minute detour, I was also greeted with no way up whatsover. BAH! So I headed south towards some other mountains I saw, this time with great success. Once more, it had a pretty cool view at the top. Xizikou (溪子口山) and Jingmei (景美山) - check. I really should estimate the total progress towards my Everest height goal.

Afterwards, I headed back to Carrefour to get some dinner with friends. The night randomly turned into drinking at the nearby college campus, which had happened once before and was a great time. There was no disappointment this time as well, and an interesting conversation got me thinking about a few things. I don't want to spoil anything, but the next blog will be about that, and it'll be a long one.

So now we come to today. My plans to go to Tamshui for the day fell through, so I had the day to myself and nothing to do. I decided to head over to the National Palace Museum, AKA the thing listed first on every guide I've seen about Taipei. Basically, when the Nationalists fled China, they took all the artsy stuff with them. This is the largest exhibit in the world of Chinese artifacts, so I thought it'd be interesting.

Taiwan, your artifacts can go suck it. China, you're not missing anything. First of all, they wouldn't accept my student subway card or ID so I had to pay full price. Ok, whatever. I'm not actually a student, that's fine. But I think the term "artifact" is used rather loosely here. Yeah sure, there were Ming vases, a bunch of jade stuff,  you know. But they also had letters from officials to the emperor requesting a few days of sick leave. Really? Some dude from 200 years ago catches a cold and now it's noteworthy? I would show you a photo, but there were no photos allowed anywhere inside. To their credit, they go to a lot of trouble to protect this stuff, They warn you the entire facility is kept quite chilly and dry. In adorable Taiwan fashion, they have guards who stand around with a "No talking loudly" sign. If you start to raise your voice, as one Japanese tour group did, they come walking over to you wailing it about. Careful -you'll scare the paper!

We have palm trees!

Also, I want to know what airline they used when they transported all this fragile stuff out of China. I can't fly anywhere without my luggage getting absolutely destroyed or lost. Meanwhile Taiwan has enough porcelain to literally fill a mountain. There's no way they checked that - must've all been carry on.

In short, I was a bit unimpressed. If you're an art lover, I can see the appeal of a piece of jade that looks like cabbage. I mean, I'll be damned if it wasn't the spitting image of a cabbage, but I find that stuff quite dull. So I went back to the bus station in hopes of doing something else, but I noticed one of the stops was the Taipei Astronomy Museum. I thought, why not? So off I went.

The Astronomy Museum is 20x cooler than the National Palace Museum, even though it looks like (and probably was) designed in the 80s. While they had a few modern pieces, like a model of Curiosity, it was mostly stuff we've known since Voyager. I was a little surprised though that there was a very large focus on NASA, and virtually nothing on Russia. I tried to find even a mention of Yuri Gagarin, and it just wasn't there. But they had a lot of really cool interactive exhibits that I quite enjoyed. My favorite was the doppler effect, which I just pushed a button expecting a speaker to play some sound. Instead I saw sparks fall down at the top of my eye. I jumped back in surprise as this little remote control car hanging from the ceiling SCREAMS away, sparks flying. It whips around nearly the whole museum, scaring the heck out of anyone it passes over. After about 20 seconds, it comes back to a stop in front of me, and yup, definitely had the doppler effect going on.

After that it was about dinner time, so I decided to call it a day. I can rest easy, knowing that according to the Taipei Astronomy Museum, Pluto is still a planet.

Although I still don't know why the space shuttle has a Taiwanese flag on it.