Taipei

We only had two days to spend in Taipei, unfortunately. But we really packed it in! We checked out the National Palace Museum, which holds all of the Chinese treasure looted by the Nationalists when they fled to Taiwan. This isn't my own picture, but two of the most famous objects in the museum are a delicately carved jade napa cabbage and a piece of jasper carved to look like a piece of pork belly. Chinese people are amazing.

We paid our respects to Chiang Kai-Shek and Sun Yat-Sen and watched the changing of the guards at their monuments. Here we are in front of Sun Yat-Sen's memorial:

Dave's cousin took us out of the hustle of the city to the coast and the nearby mountain town of Jioufen, which used to be a center for gold mining. We walked through the winding alleys of a street market to find this stunning view:

We visited a tiny local museum about the practice of gold mining in the area (the mines are now closed). After breaking the ore into chunks, they ground the rock into tiny bits with a foot wheel:

And a special rocking chute was used to wash the worthless rock from the heavy gold:

One interesting fact I learned is that many of the miners in Jioufen were Cantonese men who had worked in the U.S. during the Gold Rush. Just seeing this in the chute gave us a little spark of gold fever:

We capped off the day by watching the sunset while drinking mountain oolong tea – prepared the proper way: