Muesums and restaurants of central Taiwan

Last weekend some of Yini’s old friends had organized a short trip to have a chance to see each other and visit a number of interesting places. We joined but took our own car and made our own hotel booking for convenience.

The trip started with a short drive to Miaoli where the group gathered for lunch and the girls ended up chatting for a long time. Due to my still rather poor Chinese, I was not really able to join the conversation and ended up reading blogs all the while. We left the restaurant and planned to take a walk in the area but the rain put a stop to that plan, and we ended up in a nearby tourist shop/café where the girls chatted some more over coffee while I drained my phone battery further. Kind of boring for me but the girls haven’t seen each other in a few months so its understandable they would want to catch up.

Next up was a Hakka culture center and museum where we walked around for a few hours. Some of the exhibitions were fairly interesting but some just mediocre and I ended up going through quicker than the rest and had to wait.

When we got out it was late afternoon so we split again and drove separately to Taizhong and our respective hotels. Me and Yini rested up for a bit then went to meet the others at a restaurant down town. Dinner consisted of more conversation in Chinese and blog reading on my part.

After dinner we took a walk nearby and ended up in a park located at the bottom of the foundation pit for a large building project gone bankrupt. A very interesting place to put a park and a relief for me since I was running out of both battery and blog posts to read.

Some shots from the park

On Sunday we gathered after breakfast at Asia University Art Museum. The museum building itself is made by famous architect Tadao Ando and is a minimalistic, triangular piece of glass and bare faced concrete, which is good enough in itself. A few pieces of modern art from the exhibition inside also caught my fancy, I especially liked a cosmic rhino by Salvatore Dali.

Being less cultured than the others I spent less time looking at the artworks and ended up waiting once more. We had lunch in a small but popular restaurant in a small town kind of place then headed for a nearby old mansion come museum for our last stop. We took a tour through the old mansion, the guide pointing out all the intricate details of the decoration. I’m sure it was very interesting for the ones who understood Chinese, for me it was way too long.

All in all I believe Renegade Wife enjoyed the trip and meeting her friends. I was a bit bored but I guess it can be the other way around when we meet my friends sometimes.