National Palace Museum

Recently Rich and I spent an afternoon at the National Palace Museum - this sign was on the bus on the way to the museum and I thought it was photo worthy.
As you can see from the photograph's the building is very impressive and beautiful - especially set against a forest.







I have to admit that even though this muesum had an amazing collection of very old and interesting Chinese historical items I didn't enjoy it that much. The reason for this can be simplified into two words "tour groups" - I have no problem with tour groups in general but on this day I cannot even begin to guess how many tour groups were at this museum. It felt like whenever we started to look at an item around twenty other people in one of these evil tour groups would push in front of us.

However, there was something even worse than the tour groups pushy manner and this was the sheer noise of them. I don't expect people to be completely silent in a museum - if you see something interesting sure you'll want to talk about it , but the volume at which most of these tour groups spoke was more like something I would expect to hear at a pub on a Friday night. It was so frustrating!

After the madness of the museum - we stumbled across this lovely garden which was a nice surprise. I especially loved the bat window at the entrance.







Whilst we were in the gardens we were able to buy some fish food from a vending machine and feed the coy carp in the ponds. The result of this was a total fish frenzy!
Finally - when we were in the gardens we saw this huge snail (it must have been 10 cm long) - I really wanted it to come out of it's shell but it just wanted to hide away.