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This Wednesday, I went to Yingge again for another round of pottery class outside the school. This time, we went to a museum. See below:
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Taipei County Yingko Ceramics Museum. (It reads Yingko because that is the pronunciation of the townships name is Taiwanese, where Yingge is Mandarin. Very similar though, right?
Now, let me just come with a complaint. I was working hard being creative this Tuesday in floristry class and forgot that hot glue can also stick to fingers, so while my finger isn't exactly hurting, it feels strange typing.
I also just had a kind of exam in MICE class I believe (still have to make a presentation later though.) And I have been dedicating a lot of my recent free time to building a miniature booth without much details that I will however show you soon when I have a final picture of it. (I made it at home, but it's in the school now.)
So yeah... I should talk about ceramics instead...
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My classmates and teacher in front of the museum. I wonder what the paper is for.
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Yah! Group pictures. That's what we do in Taiwan!
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It's raining a lot these days. Not that one would need any umbrellas just for this Wednesday. It's been going from between heat waves and monsoon rain from day to day recently, though. While rain cools down a lot, it's still really hot most of the time and I often run around sweating under my umbrella (thus getting soaked anyway, lol).
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Okay: To the pottery stuff. The exhibition kind of already starts at the lockers. Each locker here is equipped with it's own handmade ceramic painting (tile). People rarely have a need for using the lockers though, I believe. Most people seems to be visiting the museum while tourbussing around.
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Here's the inside of a kiln.
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Wanted to crop this picture really nicely so I went and downloaded Google's Picasa. Now it's gone crazy scanning all my pictures and finding peoples faces. Seems like an interesting tool. And nice photo don't you think?
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Tell you the truth, I didn't understand much of the Chinese. But it was totally okay to take pictures in the museum, so I did that some more. Surprisingly it is, you can actually find a lot of museums where it will be perfectly fine to snap photos while most shops and restaurants wont allow people to do so even from the outside. That's Asia I guess.
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"Divine Chalices". According to the describing text, these seven seven bowls were used to give offerings to "good brothers".
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A ceramic rat trap.
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Ceramic pillows. These were the most comfortable looking ceramic pillows I've seen so far. If you have followed my blog closely, you might have read about these before. Apparently, people actually liked to sleep on these back in the days. They even have some that are hollow so that you can stuff in valuables or hot water (for cold days). Actually the beds here are sometimes really hard. Seems Asians don't (or didn't) find soft things as comfortable.
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Actually there's a lot of Japanese stuff in this museum. These are from the Japanese Colonial Period. There might be some interesting history in Yingge related to this that I could delve more into if i had time.
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Inside another kiln.
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Major ceramic products before Taiwan's retrocession.
Before Taiwan's retrocession, Yingge's ceramic products were basically bricks, tiles, urns, jars, basins, water tanks, and pots.
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Major ceramic products after Taiwan's retrocession.
Aside from kitchen and dining utensils, Yingge also produced industrial insulators, electrical, architectural and sanitary ceramics. They also made copies of ancient artefacts.
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Now, Yingge is mostly reputed for an artists village, but it also turns out a lot of hardware. After all, ceramics are widely used in buildings and power grids. They even had a section for future products including some components for scooters and stuff in space, but I only went there for 20 seconds before we had to go back. It was not part of our class.
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What remains of interest to anyone visiting the city to experience, this is what's important.
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Yay. I like Picasa very much already. Very fast image processing with a very nice automatic lighting and colour fix.
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See that magnifying glass to the left? It magnifies tiny little Chinese words that you might be able to spot on the tea pot if you look really closely at it's side. Unfortunately for me, this is just an obstruction for picture taking, as I can't read Chinese that well. Especially not when so small! But it's a cool teapot anyway.
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This one as well.
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After class we had some time to stroll around before the bus would come and pick us up. So we went to this really nice little street. Almost no people were there and almost no traffic.
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Classmate.
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Classmate.
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Yeah. Woo! Classmates. I wish I was better at catching peoples Chinese names and then also remembering. Then I could give their names to Picasa and have it search all around for them.
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Didn't take much pictures down throh the road, but they had some really nice stores. I especially liked this store that sold candies and small tin robots. I didn't feel much like taking pictures since store-owners often don't like it and I didn't want to ruin my mood over getting asked not to.
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Anyway. Here's the last picture taken. Tomorrow I will go to some Rotary thing that's going to last all weekend and all the districts are going to be there. Blah. I bet it will be boring. But I will take pictures of people.
You have a nice weekend for me, okay? See you.