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Park around Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall 國父紀念館公園

Everyone who comes to visit Taipei sooner or later ends up in the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. This large building with a typical golden Chinese roof has been build to commemorate the Founder of the Republic of China, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. The Memorial Hall houses Sun Yat-Sen's huge statue, many exhibition halls and a performance hall (which used to be place for Kuomintang's assemblies).

There is an interesting change of guards every hour throughout the day. If you would like to see how it looks like, take a watch the video below (not the best quality, but you may still find it interesting).



Let's now move to the park next to the Memorial Hall, because that's where our nature class took place.

We started the class with looking closely at some trees in the park. Kids could touch different kinds of bark, look at different fruits from these trees and examine their leaves.

This native to Japan, China and Taiwan tree is also called "monkey can't climb tree" 猴不爬樹. It takes it's name from the bark that is very slippery so monkeys can't climb it:



Kids have spent more time looking at the fruits of this tree. They found a few on the ground and looked for the seeds inside them. The seeds are very delicate and when thrown in the air they rotate like helicopter.


What we see on the photos below are the flowers of the fig tree.There is a tiny hole in the covering of the flowers, through this hole a small wasp goes in to pollinate it. The wasp also lays eggs inside. Very often one can find wasp larvae inside the fig. And that's why the fig is often called in Chinese "no-flower fruit" 無花果.


Kids loved playing with the grass called "shy grass" 害羞草. When touched the grass curls itself like if it was very shy. In English and Polish it also has a similar names - shamegrass and mimoza wstydliwa. I found a very interesting video about this kind of grass, but ... it's in Chinese.


The weather was not the best on the day of our class, it was drizzling on and off. That's why to stay dry we hid under the roof of a small pagoda in the middle of the pond. The teacher prepared an nature art activity and also read a book to the kids.



There was also time for a snack.


As you can see there is a nice pond in the park. This time of the year not many water plants or birds can be seen there, but here is what we spotted:



The pond itself looks like this:







From the middle of the pond you can see the Taipei 101 building and ... very tall palm trees :-)



Kids finished off their class with sucking on the sweet nectar of these flowers:



I was surprised to see the cherry blossoms at this time of the year:




In the park there is an ice-cream shop, Big Tom. Their ice-cream are really yummy, but quite expensive. We didn't go there this time.



Comments

  1. Oh! I've just learned something new, namely that Lagerstroemias are native to Japan/China/Taiwan. They are my favorite trees. They grow in southern U.S. states. In fact, Orlando is full of them! There's one just outside my house.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm from Hawaii. We have an endangered bird there like the one pictured. It's called a Hawaiian Moorhen. This one apparently is a "common moorhen". I learned something new and it reminded me of home :)

    ReplyDelete

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