Waking up between 6:30 and 7:00 is getting to be a pretty normal routine. I’ll be interested to see if I can continue the trend when I’m back in my confortable quiet bedroom at home. I doubt it. I didn’t think we had any plans today, so I decided that I wanted to swing by the Yamaha music store I’ve seen in passing a few times to see how their prices were. There’s a Yamaha instrument factory in Taiwan, so there’s a chance I could pick up an instrument or two for a reduced price. I wasn’t exactly sure where it was, but I knew the general area. Unfortunately, because of the mind bending way the streets are arranged, it might mean a lot of searching on foot. Laoshi said that he knew where it was and would take my dad and I to go see it after breakfast. I should have known something was up.
We found the shop okay, after walking at a snails pace and stopping so he could pluck a random leaf from a random bush and make us smell it. The prices are better than what I could get online, so there’s a good chance that I might purchase something. First, he wants to check with one of his friends, who happens to be a supplier of such things to all the schools in the area. Now that my business was out of the way, the sucker punch landed. Off to some museums! The first one we went to was a museum that housed diplomatic gifts from various countries. My dad said that if the gifts were too expensive to be of a personal nature, it belonged to the people and was housed here so people could see it free of admission. The place also housed various currencies and Taiwan currency through the ages.
After that thrilling encounter, we grabbed some lunch at a vegetarian buffet. If there were vegetarian buffets like this in the U.S., I could consider changing my eating habits. There was a large variety of foods, greens, and vegetables I’ve never seen before, and I could eat bravely with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be eating any odd parts of animals.The purple thing was supposed to be some kind of sweet potato, but I didn’t like it, and it was the only part of the meal I didn’t like. This probably ranked up there as one of my most consumed meals.
Next we went to a Natural History Museum. The saving grace was that it was small, so we didn’t spend much time there. The dinosaur exhibits were nice to look at, but I’ve been to natural history museums before, and I think the information contained within isn’t exclusive to the area of Taiwan. It’s not that I hate museums, but you have to understand, everything is in Chinese, and laoshi Shen only speaks Chinese so I don’t get any information from any of the displays besides what I can deduce from a preschool level. Also, the guy talks a lot so he moves very very slowly though the exhibits, increasing the time spent in these places. Luckily, this place had a small café, so I picked up a mango smoothie and waited for them there after I was done looking around.
After that, it was time for dinner, so we wandered though a nearby park to a café where we waited the arrival of my dad’s friend Shao Shin. On the way there, we came upon some odd little long legged birds that were hunting for worms in the dusk hours. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my zoom lens, but I did have one of my faster lenses, so I did get to capture some of the action, despite the low light. Dinner tonight was hotpot, and I requested the vegetable heavy portion, which still came with some intestine and beef. Of course, I passed the intestine on to my dad and happily ate all the veggies.
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