National Palace Museum....and food

Yesterday morning we were given a brief guided tour of the CYCU campus by Wesley, one of the volunteers from the program, and he took us out for a "real Taiwanese breakfast". We went to a small cafe around the corner from our dorms

How can you go wrong with a mascot like that?

The breakfast was, in a word, fantastic. Each meal set came with an appetizer, a main dish and a drink. Mine and Erik's consisted of a fried noodle dish with vegetables and chicken (like Yakisoba):

Your choice of sauce. I wanted curry, but they were all out.

A pork cutlet with small salad:

Oops, I already ate most of the salad before remembering to take a pic...

and a concoction they called Milk Tea, which is, as near as I can tell, five parts soy milk, one part tea and 500,000 parts sugar. It's the best tea I've ever had. BreeAnn, Andrew and our guide, Wesley, had.... hamburgers:

Travel 6,500 miles for this?

They looked quite good, though, and they enjoyed them. It was served with Red Tea (like the Milk Tea, but with water and some form of red tea. Same amount of sugar.) and "carrot cakes":

Not quite what I was expecting, but they are tasty. "White carrots", flour and a little sugar.

So, after the meal and tour, Wesley bid us farewell and we had an afternoon with no plans. Andrew had found some information on the National Palace Museum online, so we looked up the train information, took a cab ($4 for all four of us) to the train station, took a surprisingly full local train to Taipei($2), transferred to an MRT train in Taipei ($1) and took another cab to the museum(again, $4), all without any Chinese being spoke (other than shie shie). Ah, the power of pointing at maps, holding up fingers and a lot of nodding and smiling!

The museum was wonderful, but we weren't allowed to take any pictures inside. There was a "tearoom" restaurant on the top floor with a wonderful view, a live zither performance and some slightly overpriced snacks. We had the fortune of ordering nearly everything they were out of, and our check looked like one of my Digital Logic exam questions, but it was good (sorry,  no pics!). Unfortunately, we were all a bit too jet lagged to get as much out of the museum as we otherwise would have, but it was an enjoyable adventure.

On the way back, we took the High Speed Rail train, rather than the local train, which was very nice, and quite cheap ($6). The MRT trains use special IR tokens for fares. You scan them when you enter, and drop them in a slot when you exit. Pretty cool, actually, and saves a lot of paper tickets

After the rather full day, I, being the old man that I am, passed out around 7:30, and was awake around 1AM (yay, jet lag!). I finally got up at 4:30 and took a walk over to the CYCU track for a run before the sun came up too much. It was a very humid 80 degrees, but fine for running. The track was a little overgrown, being the middle of summer, but quite nice and quite busy:

Nice sports complex, with tennis and basketball courts a 1/4 mile cushioned track

Did I mention it rained...again?

I was afraid I'd be the only one out running that early, and would look a little suspicious and out of place, but there were about 20 people already there when I arrived, walking and running before it got hot. As is true universally, there is ALWAYS the one old guy WALKING in the inner lane to dodge, but otherwise an easy run.

Today is our opening ceremony and first project lectures. We'll see how it goes!