Day 16/ Day 17

Yesterday I went to a warehouse sale with my two aunts who live in Taipei. I didn't buy anything, but I found this t-shirt highly amusing.

Multiple people are probably walking around Taiwan with this shirt right now. I stood at the t-shirt section laughing by myself for a good while. Other t-shirts were funny too, but I didn't want someone to yell at me for taking pictures, so I only risked this one. Another one I saw had a bunch of random English sentences and then in big bold letters, "God Wants You." The also had a shirt with "AMERICAN" written across the front, which I thought was sort of ironic (maybe wishful thinking?). They are obsessed with what my 3-year-old cousin calls 'ABCs.'

It is currently 9pm on Day 17. Today my two aunts and my uncle drove me to a town called Guanyin where there was supposed to be an exhibition of lotus flowers. We drove for two hours (a really long time to drive in Taiwan!) from Taipei because we took the scenic route by the ocean. We passed some beautiful mountains on the way and on the other side was the huge pacific ocean. It was perfect. But when we got to Guanyin (which is also the name of the mountain from the Danshui post and the feminine Buddha) all we found was a small farm of lotus flower pads with only a couple flowers blooming. Here is the one lotus flower we saw that was close enough to photograph.

After we stayed there for all of 5 minutes, my aunt said the lotus flowers at the Taipei Museum of History were better, so off we went. We drove an hour to the museum, which was actually really fantastic. We saw an exhibition on African weapons from the late 19th/early 20th century, as well an an exhibit on Tonka paintings like the ones at Emory! One of my favorite objects I saw was a brazier stand shaped like an animal from 770-476BC. At first I thought they were talking about a bra stand, but apparently the word brazier is something related to metal. Here is a link to what it looked like. http://digital.nmh.gov.tw/collection/pda/en/30203.htm

The history museum overlooks the Taipei Botanical Gardens where the lotus garden is. This one was much more impressive.

There was another small pond with lotus pads outside of the history museum, so I took a picture with that one as well as proof that Taipei has much better lotus flowers than Guanyin.