Guand Temple & the National Museum

Yesterday afternoon we went to the Guandu Temple and the National Museum. The temple was incredibly beautiful with hand carved wood murals, statues of Buddhist gods, and amazing architecture within the temple and on its roofs.
This is one of the many dragons on one of the roofs of the temple. Since the temple has different levels, there are a lot of roofs to decorate. The view behind this dragon is of a wetland park and Taipei is in the very back. At a lot of the temples here, there are rocks inlaid into a strip like this, with the pointy (but rounded) parts up. The purpose of these is to take your shoes off and walk across them. They give you a foot massage and if you are "healthy" you should be able to walk all the way down the strip of rocks. I thought it felt good on my feet, but I only got about 1/4 of the way down the strip. Here, it looks like Eric went all the way at the end and returning, but he cheated. He ran way down there just for a picture. Mom and Fion also tried it, but they both said it hurt way too much and put their shoes back on after only a few steps.

Here is us outside of the temple. This is almost at the top, so you are only seeing the top half of the temple. The view from the top is amazing, as you will see in the next picture. The red bridge is apparently a famous bridge here in Taiwan.

My absolute favorite part of the day was when we went to the National Museum. They had artifacts from as far back as 2500 B.C. We signed up to take an English tour and saw the most important/famous pieces in the museum. If I had known how great it was going to be, I could have spent all day there all by myself! I love museums and always like to see everything in them. This one was 3 stories tall and it has only 1% of its holdings on display at any one time. Amazing! I only took pictures outside, because I didn't know if you could take them inside; many museums will not let photos be taken of display items.

The building behind us is not actually the museum, but an auditorium that is built to "match" the museum, which is to our left in the picture.