Staying cool

We kept hearing that there was a “typhoon a-comin” and we hoped that it held off until we were safely back in Japan.

Today was a day for staying out of the heat. We started with the National Taiwan Museum. It’s the oldest museum building in Taipei – built in 1908 by the Japanese. It looks like a European monumnent with columns, a domed roof and various wings. It was a lovely museum and I especially enjoyed the sections on Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples. An artist called Chen Chi-iu had been commissioned to do sketches of various artifacts from aboriginal communities around the country and I really enjoyed these. Made me want to dust off my sketch book.

It was all about staying out of the sun today so we had lunch in the underground mall at the main train station. We chose a lively teppanyaki place and had piles of lovely fresh food. We wondered why we had never found a teppanyaki restaurant in Japan – do they exist there?

The mall under the train station is quite good fun. There is a section were you can get massages while everyone walks past you on their way to the next boutique. People were getting massaged with what looked like meat cleavers! I am pretty sure that they weren’t actually meat cleavers, but seriously – that’s what it looked like. We weren’t in a rush to try it.