Taipei Nov 13-14

In the morning we visited the “Children’s municipal recreation centre” It didn’t sound very fun and to be honest it was a bit too super-organised. It was empty on this Thursday morning, so Emma and Lara had huge bouncy castles and playgrounds to themselves. They did also have a space and science centre.

As we left it began to rain again. After getting completely soaked on the last two days, I had my raincoat with me and as I fiddled with this and the rain-cover for the pram, a passing Chinese family stopped and gave us their umbrella. We caught up with them in the car park to thank them and ask directions to the nearby Confucius temple, but they misunderstood our question and gave us another umbrella!
This is our favourite example of how kind and helpful the people are here. So many people stop to ask if we need directions, or just to smile at the children. Actually, Chinese are crazy about kids, the city is full of great facilities for mums and babies - they even had special Breastfeeding rooms in metros and museums.

The Confucius temple was beautiful and peaceful, but rather touristy and museum-like, so we wondered about the religiousness of the Taiwanese, until we found the Bodao temple around the next corner, where the real temple life was going on at full speed. Dorka was in some sort of paradise herself, and she is the family’s temple fan, so we had to drag her out after only one hour and 100 photos!

Here and at the Longshao temple, the next morning, we could see a very wide range of people from businessmen to young mums to old grannies all popping in to do make their prayers. There were also busloads of Chinese tourists too, so these temples were packed. In fact here we could see more white faces in 5 minutes than we’d seen in 3 days in Taipei so far! “So this is where they keep all the tourists” I said as we arrived.

On the long walk back to the hotel, Dorka stopped for a fascinating massage, where they actually pummel people using butcher’s knives. She said it’s not painful at all after a minute or so, and quite nice after 10 minutes. (I suspect it’s nicest of all when they stop)

We visited the Palace Museum on our last day. Though the main exhibition wasn’t too much fun for the children, there was a separate Children’s exhibition which was, like most facilities in Taiwan, fantastically well-designed. Emma played a lot of Chinese culture-related games: Chinese printing, marionettes, she made a classical Chinese painting out of puzzles, she had to recreate a famous painting positioning magnetic pieces.

Then it was a rush back to the hotel, to pick up our stuff (the very nice staff had allowed us to occupy the room until 6:30) and then onwards to Australia!

See all our Taipei photos, click on the Confucious Giftshop!

Taipei 2