Today's highlight were Yeliu national park and Free square in Taipei. However the view of the eastern coastline of Taiwan along the drive was very picturesque. In the morning we had kinda singing competition between guides and group members before a movie was aired. However, it was obvious wrong selection. When the movie was on, some of my group revolted,since in this America -produced documentary about Mao, our Mao was depicted as a 'womanizer and dictator'. One sentence from it impressing me the most was, by his private doctor, Mao had strong influence from his countryside background and the only entertainment he enjoyed the most was fucking women, especially young women.
After a whole morning's drive and early lunch, we arrived at Yeliu around 1:30 pm. In bright sunshine and under blue sky, we lingered around enjoying all these fantastically weird rock sculptures created naturally by the sea and wind erosion.
At 3 pm we set off on the way to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. We stopped at one duty-free store, where my group craved much cigarette and local wines before we arrived very cautiously at Free Square, used to be a monumental square to Chiang Kai-shek. Due to reasons of minimizing political influence, groups from the mainland are not encouraged from our side to pay visits to similar places as well as former residences of Chiang, although we see not strong points in doing so. However many groups are doing it secretly as our tour representative requested me strongly too to take this group here, since his former groups did it recently. The local guide cautioned us that we should all keep in mind that we come here not for sightseeing but instead using the free toilet facility in case when any security or tour police approached us to carry out possible check.
It was sunset time when we got there after the bus drove past his presidential palace. And DiBao ( emperor's treasure) tower, the most deluxe residence in Taipei, and it's here my icon Dee Hsiu lives. The driver carefully parked at its side gate and we walked then to its southern end of the square. The pinkish and blue sky made nice light there and we took quick snaps before we were attracted to the middle where the flag-lowering ceremony was to take place. Great timing. Besides us there were another two groups and lots of locals. We didn't feel any tense atmosphere there though, as the locals were jogging, chatting and dancing even all through the ceremony with two twin toddlers were playing and laughing right under the flag pole.
There on the norther end of the square was the monument to Chiang. Although the local guide was ready to take us out of here, one man didn't obey though and began running up the stairs into it, who was soon followed by others. The door was being closed down just when we finished looking around inside. Funnily, some really 'special souvenirs' our group left there were that three men couldn't control their call from the nature and thus peed in public and in front of the bushes and flowers. How ironical!
The dinner restaurant was located on Zhongxiao street east, where we eye witnessed the night view of the modern aspect of this city. And after here, we drove to the Shilin night market, which turned out to be dirty and very boring. We hit the road for our hotel ambassador only 15 minutes later.
No comments:
Post a Comment