The American student teachers traveled to the capital of Taipei on July 23 for an overnight stay. They boarded the high-speed rail train early, reaching Taipei in only 90 minutes!
The teachers spent some hours visiting the National Palace Museum and learning about Chinese history. The Museum was originally founded in 1925 in the Forbidden City in Beijing. In 1949, civil war was raging between the Nationalist Government and the Communists. The government shipped 600,000 treasured works of art to Taiwan to protect them from the war. The permanent collection of over 677,000 pieces has been stored in the current museum since 1965, and the pieces document more than 8,000 years of Chinese history. The displays are rotated every three months, and about 60,000 pieces can be viewed at a time. The exhibits include jades, vessels, weapons, ceramics, calligraphy, documents, rare books, antiquities, and paintings going as far back as the Neolithic Age. The Museum is ranked as one of the four best museums in the world. Now, digital technology is being used to make the exhibits more animated.
Next stop: Taipei 101. The Taipei 101 Observatory is one of the tallest buildings in the world. They traveled up to the 89th floor in the world's fastest high-speed elevator and viewed the extensive city of Taipei in all directions. The Observatory holds the world's largest wind damper, and is built to resist the strongest earthquakes and gale winds. The teachers dined in the Taipei 101 Grand Market, which seats up to 1,200 people---and it was so crowded that nearly every seat was taken! Then, they visited a famous Taipei night market, which was also very, very crowded!
Their first stop on Sunday was the remarkable Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, a tribute to a great leader who led the wars against the Chinese Communist Party. He died in 1975, and this beautiful memorial hall was inaugurated in 1980 to acknowledge him and to his efforts to modernize the Republic of China. The teachers witnessed the impressive changing of the Taiwanese military guard at the memorial, and they visited the six chambers of the history museum on the bottom floor. The inscriptions on the side walls describe Chiang Kai-shek's philosophy: "The purpose of life is to improve the general life of humanity", and "The meaning of life is to create and sustain subsequent lives in the universe."
On Sunday, the teachers shopped at the four-story Taiwan Handicraft Promotion Center. This provided an opportunity for them to purchase special Taiwanese souvenirs and gifts for family and friends. In the late afternoon, they returned to the high speed rail station, and in 90 minutes, they were back "home" in Kaohsiung and ready for a good night's sleep!
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