Day 19

Today, I was headed to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial to pay my respects to a very great and dead man. I had passed by the memorial previously on my way to the Taipei 101 area with my cousin, but today I actually went inside. As expected, there were people practicing dance routines outside, and hordes of tourists taking pictures and getting in my way. It was about this time that I realized that either a) someone had lifted my camera from my bag or b) I left it at home. Either way, I was pissed.

As soon as I entered the memorial, there was (just like at the CKS memorial) a huge bronze statue of Mr. SYS sitting on a chair, with two guards. I looked through some of the adjoining exhibits (they really have quite a Sun Yat-sen cult here...everything was “great” or “immortal.”) It wasn’t anything spectacular, though, so I bought a postcard and left to go to Taipei 101.

But then I had an incredible urge to drop my kids off at the pool and recalling my wonderful experience in the CKS memorial restroom, headed back to the Sun Yat-sen memorial. Just in time to see the changing of the guard (really, it’s a really drawn out and not that impressive display. Seriously...the Japanese could probably invade, take the billion ton statue, and leave before the guards are through their second stomp-on-floor-salute-strut routine.) The restrooms were disappointing.

After taking my brownies out of the oven, I headed to 101 to stroll around, take one last good look, and play in the arcade, because I wanted to get the high score on the boxing game. Alas, I was 10 points short this time.

I grew weary and then headed home..not a very eventful day.

Sidebar: I took off my socks and found that my left foot had some kind of insect bite. It had a really weird shape and caused my foot to swell up...interesting.