"Spring Break" Update

Here I sit trying to recall my adventures. I must have had a great time as I had no time to sit down and write. Nor did I have time to take many pictures...the options on my camera are limited at best, so bear with me.

I went tearing into Tian Mu on Thursday morning, dropped off my bags, and took a taxi to the National Palace Museum. It is one of my favorite museums in Taipei as it holds the booty that Chiang Kai Shek and the Kau Ming Tang forces (KMT=the Chinese Nationalist Party) brought with them when they fled the mainland after being defeated by the Communists. I arrived around 11 AM to view my favorite rooms, the pottery room and the small treasures storage boxes room, when the building became INUNDATED with busloads of tourists and students. Trust me when I say the tourist buses were visitors from the Mainland. China is allowing them to travel to Taiwan now, and the Taiwanese government is welcoming them and their tourist dollars with open arms. They behave much worse than the "ugly Americans" who earned their tourist reputation in earlier times. I found I could not walk or even turn around without being roughed up by the gangs of mainland tourists, so I opted to leave and go to the Puppet Museum...just not worth the trauma of bruises and prospective broken bones! I am very intimidated now after an elder gentleman from Taiwan knocked me half way down to the ground at the Flower Market. K had to get between me and the "gentleman," or I would have become the ugly American!

I honestly thought the taxi driver would never find the Puppet Museum. It is downtown on a very busy, very old street in a very old building. The ground floor holds a rather large room where they carve puppet heads and sew their embroidered clothes...and I would love to have had a tour of that room and their operations. A walk up four floors of very steep, very scary stairs led me through carved wooden storage boxes, old portable puppet stages, and all manner of puppets. The Taiwanese are famous for their hand puppets, but the museum also had examples of puppets on strings, shadow puppets from Indonesia, and water puppets from Vietnam. There was a very cramped room that showed what happened to the puppeteers in the PRC during the cultural revolution...not news to me, but still very frightening to hear the video stories. Let me be frank when I say the museum needs a new location in order to highlight the importance of this art. When I returned to the first floor, they had a puppet stage set up and were starting to practice a new story. They also had puppets for sale, but none like the ones I saw being made, so none of them came home with me. Two museums...enough for one day...and I had a deep desire to get into the kitchen and cook...and I had NOT felt that need since December!

I grocery shopped and made White Bean Chicken Chili (with beans from scratch...something I had never been successful at before), Two-Bean Red Chili (with ground chicken for the base...white meat looks odd floating in the red broth, but it still tasted good!), mexi-pork in the crock pot (enough for lunch tacos and a pan of enchiladas for the freezer). I made vegetable curry, chicken curry, and vegetable salad before I left. A and I made and frosted Easter cookies, and I gave her a lesson in making Kerry cookies. I even made an Apple Cake for Candace to take to the Dell Wives' luncheon. OK...so I'm over that urge now!

On Friday I went to the Museum of Fine Arts. They had four visiting shows that were very interesting, yet I'm always disappointed when I cannot see any of their permanent collection. The architecture show of Richard Rogers' work was really incredible. I believe it had already been to the Louvre. There were lots of students at the exhibit, many taking pictures up close and personal of the wonderful 3-dimensional displays and stories. I did say "no" to the honor of having my picture taken with 2 of the young women, but I'm sure I made it on their cameras anyway. The second was a collection of paintings by young Korean artists, many of them I would have liked to have in my home. The third was a room full of wool, hand-crocheted ultra-modern clothes designed by a young man who is winning many honors for his work. The last one was a display of photos by a famous Taiwanese photographer from the 40s-60s that was absolutely fascinating. His history of local family life and some of the famous religious holiday celebrations were irreplaceable. He was also invited to preserve history by the anthropologists who documented the lives of the indigenous tribes as civilization was moving in on their old life styles. One visitor told me he was a member of one of the tribes, and "these are my sisters and brothers."

One of the local western tourist magazines had an article on tea rooms in Taipei, so high on my list of things-to-do-on-my-break was to have a luncheon tea. One taxi driver sweated out a very hard to find tea room in one of the many lanes in downtown Taiwan. When I finally figured out how to get into the building, they told me I had to wait 2 hours before I could be seated...a TM for sure. The room was reserved for a private office meeting. Low and behold, my taxi drive followed me in and berated the staff and owners as someone outside had told him I would not get seated. He didn't wait for me to jump back into his taxi though! I walked out to the street to get a taxi to another tea room on the list, and he left me at #21, Lane 27 on the SOUTH side of the road...wrong end of town...another TM when the people at #21 told me what had happened. The taxi drive was lost and so was I. It clearly was NOT a tea room, and I was the one who was embarrassed! Another taxi ride to #21, lane 27 on the NORTH side of twon got me to the tea room that had absolutely no where to sit down and have lunch/tea. There were plenty of tables, but the crowd was sitting with empty beer bottles and drink glasses and clearly were not ready to depart...another TM. I ended up at a Japanese restaurant for a rice and chicken lunch with coffee...no tea...another TM...and home I went!

Saturday found us cooking and baking (see list above). C wanted to view a garden stool and umbrella stand that she "needed" for her new decorating turn in her living room. The shop...in which she had spent an unexpected 15 minutes when she spied the potential purchases...was four stories of objects crammed everywhere with hardly a place to walk. Everything we professed interest in had an incredibly high price with no room for bargaining. We ended up on the top floor outside in the rain and mist...still more pieces, both broken and whole. Working our way back down, C settled on a price she was willing to pay for the two pieces she needed out of the dirty mess. We continued to look and try to bargain, then announced we were going to leave. Truly, our heads were ready to burst and I know my hair was on fire! And there were NO other customers in sight. SUDDENLY, they accepted C's offer, and also reduced the price of a vase I was looking at by one-third. I was unhappy enough that it killed all interest I had in the vase (and I think I can get it much more cheaply in Yingge). We left them to clean up the pieces C bought, and headed to Sogo's to buy one more pink stool for A's new table. We hopped in a taxi, picked up the newly cleaned and wrapped pieces, dropped them off at the apartment, and headed to the American School to watch A's basketball game. WHEW! Success after all, and you will see the stool in the Easter picture under the new zebra console table next to the new bedroom table in the Easter pictures...coming up next!