Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall


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This gigantic building is the actual memorial. Inside the dark door is a statue of "the man" himself, sitting in huge chair, sorta like the Lincoln memorial.  Jenny is included for scale.

On the ground floor is a museum of pictures of Chiang and some of his personal stuff, including two of his cars!  The tour goes chronologically through his life, and tells the story of the rise and fall of the Republic of China, ending with the reassuring promise that the revolution is still going on, and that one day the suffering people in the parts of China that are still controlled by dirty scheming rebels will be saved when the righteous solidiers of the revolution return there to reunite China.

 

Above is "the man", and below is one of the guards that stand on either side of the statue.  The guard is changed once an hour in a slow ceremony where the guards periodically hit their rifles against the ground making a loud noise.  There was a class of the Taiwan equivalent of kindergarteners watching that screamed and laughed every time the guards made the noise.  Another angry looking military guy came over and yelled at the kids and told them to be quiet, and amazingly they were pretty quiet for the rest of the ceremony.
 
 

These are a swarm of the same little kids that were disrupting the changing of the guard ceremony.

Me, at one of the gates to the park that surrounds the memorial, and one of the two theater buildings that is in the same park.

 

Jenny feeding fish (can you see them?), and the fish fighting and jumping for the food.  Also this little island in the middle of the pond that was covered with turtles.  There was so little room and so many turtles that they are standing on each other, but you can't really see it. 

 

The girl all the way on the left asked Jenny, in perfect Chinese, to take their picture for them.  The other girls also each produced a camera and made the same request.  After all their pictures were taken I said, "wait, one more" and quickly took their picture while they were still posing.  Jenny asked one of the non-Chinese ones how long she's been studying the language to speak so well, and she said just three months!  It turns out the are from the Mormon church, in Taiwan on a "mission".  They only asked us if we wanted to recieve an important message about Jesus Christ once, sticking mostly to regular conversation topics.