You are looking at the National Taiwan Museum. Not to be confused with the National Palace Museum which houses all the treasures from China's more than 5,000 years of history. The National Taiwan Museum is more focused on Taiwan.
Today was my first visit, I had never gone before because I thought it was the 2/28 museum, which is understandable because this museum is in the 2/28 memorial park. However the 2/28 museum is in another area of the park, although that museum is different from the 2/28 one that I have been to a few times. I have never been to this 2/28 one, as you have to pay to go in and asking the lady who works there what the difference is between the two, she responded with "pretty much the same thing." So I've saved my money by only going to the free one.
Now that you are confused, it's back to the National Taiwan Museum. It was the first museum in Taiwan, built over 100 years ago by the Japanese. It also serves as a memorial of sorts for one Japanese general and another guy who was the very hard working and respected first curator of the museum. They both have statues in the museum which over the years have been taken down and put back depending on who is in power.
I had never wanted to go here until i recently discovered that they have some artifacts of the aboriginal people of Taiwan. Unfortunately their collection is quite poor and not so informative, however I am still glad I went, as some of their other exhibits were surprisingly cool.
One of these was their feature on the "wen stone" which is a stone that in some ways looks a lot like marble. it is said that it can be only found in Taiwan (with the exception of one small area of Italy but theirs is supposedly not the same). From what I understand it has a lot of other metals in it which cause it to have different colors and patterns. Some of them were quite beautiful and some were quite shocking in their shapes.
Another great exhibit was the evolution one. It of course had dinosaur skeletons which always delight, but more interesting was their information on some very strange and unique animals which went extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago. Many of them I had never even known about and was cool so see what they must have looked like and guess why they didn't make it.
There is one other thing I liked, but I'll save that for tomorrow. But before I go just two final things. First the name on the museum is written horizontally in Chinese, but you read it right to left. In my post about reading directions I forgot to mention that for most older buildings and some government buildings the reading direction is right to left. Shops and stores usually have their name going from left to right.
The last thing is that this museum has one very interesting system. All the workers were senior citizens who are volunteer workers. This is a pretty good idea to give seniors something to do, yet I would like to see them get paid for their work though. Also there were so many of them, about one worker every few steps. Never before in a museum have I ever seen such a large staff.
