Museums

Not everybody likes going to museums, I do. Taipei has a lot of smaller museums that are small enough to do a good job in an hour. Like:

The Museum of Paper(a Chinese invention)
The Museum of Drinking Water
The 228 Museum                              (essential for understanding Taiwan History)
The Taipei 228 Memorial Museum (essential for understanding Taiwan History)
The National Taiwan University Departmental Museums, (Geoscience, Physics, Agriculture, ...

Then there are the Bigger Museum that can't be done in a single day, like:

The National Palace Museum
The National History Museum
The Evergreen Maritime Museum

The Museum of Drinking Water actually tells the story of how at the beginning of the Japanese Occupation, a safe water supply for Taipei was established.

We now think of cities supplying WiFi, but a hundred years ago Taipei's problem was supplying drinkable water.

The two Museum of the 228 Event have a lot of overlap, put it is such a powerful story(if painful) that it shouldn't be missed. This is the 228 Museum on HaiNan road

I wrote about the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum before:

http://mikeess-trip.blogspot.com/2011/04/taipei-228-museumnew.html

http://tainanchineseclass.blogspot.com/2010/02/228-museum.html

This time I went to the National History Museum. It has rotating exhibits, this month there were exhibitions of a Mainland Artist(1st floor), old Black and White photos from China from the 1920s on(2nd floor), and some artist from Guatemala(4th floor). None of that was very interesting for me. But on the third floor were artifacts from China going back more than 3 thousand years.

All the influence from Buddhist India is there, it is very impressive. Well worth the trip.

Usually the smaller museums are free, at most I have paid 30NT(about $1).