Reflection of Visiting National Palace Museum

I went to visit National Palace Museum with four of our classmates, Grace, Vicky, Enid and Aya. When we arrived at the museum, it was already around 3:00 in the afternoon. We borrowed the audio guide with the museum, it cost us 100 NT. dollars to borrow the ear phones, which was kind of expensive for us. At that time, the museum was full of tons of people, which made us hard to visit our target treasures together. Hence, we divided into two groups, Enid +Vicky as one group; Aya, Grace and I as one group.

We found that the result of using audio guide wasn’t as good as we expected. The audio guide only offered some of the introduction of the treasures in the museum. What’s worse, we couldn’t hear the audio guide clearly because of the noisy environment created by different groups of tourists. Furthermore, we were forced to separate from Aya because of the other tourist. It seemed that everything was in a mass and I could only continued to visit the museum’s treasure with Grace only since it was hard for us to find either Aya or Vicky and Enid.

However, Grace and I were very lucky to bump into a guide who was leading a group of mainlander tourists. We found that the guide’s introduction was more clear and vivid than the audio guide. Thus, both Grace and I decided to follow that Chinese guide to listen to his introduction.

I found that the introduction provided Chinese guide was rich in terms of the art works’ historical backgrounds and the techniques explanation. With the Chinese guide’s help, I understood when did the art works were formed and the story behind each of the art works. Thanks to the Chinese guide Grace and I met over there, we had further understanding toward the art works such as the “Bamboo brush-holder depicting a letter reading scene from the Romance of west Chamber,” the “Aloes wood carving of the nine Elders in Xiang-shan Mountain,” the “meat shaped stone,” and the “Jadeite cabbage” etc.

I think National Palace Museum is a nice place to demonstrate the great art works of our history and country. However, the guided system isn’t very complete. In my opinion, the National Palace Museum and provide further training for the English or other languages tour guides so that these guides can provide better quality of art work introduction. Besides, there were too many tourists to visit the museum at one time, which made it hard for everyone to have chance to take a look on these treasures. If the museum can do further control of the quantity of tourists at one exhibition room at one time, the quality of visiting the museum could be improved a lot.