We went back to Taipei early in the morning with the high speed rail. It still confuses me how we don’t have these types of train in America considering the much more convenience of them for commuters. Anyways, once we got back to Taipei, we started exploring more temples, with one of them being dedicated to the 77th grandson of Confucious. One of the statues outside of the temple depicted the phrase “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” with monkeys, which is apparently derived from Confucious. This phrase is very popular in the west so its interesting to know that it came from Eastern Influence.
After seeing some of those temples, we went to the Peace Park, which is supposed to be Taiwan’s first park and museum, dating back to during the Japanese takeover. Inside of the park had a smaller sized museum that depicted the history of Taiwan after Japan left, with the civil unrest after the war, the 228 incident, the HAn Chinese coming to Taiwan in 1949, the period of martial law, etc. For such a relatively short history, Taiwan has dealt with almost every bad conflict of an old nation has gone through throughout their history, and they experienced it all in about a century of history.
We also visited the Presidential office, however the building was blocked off for visitors and non important people so we only got to see the outside of it. Still a beautiful building though.
