Started out at the Jade Museum but found that contrary to its website it opened at 10am. Aha! Plan B. Buy mobile phone from Radio Shack. No, strangely they don't sell them here. Also failed to find a road map in a couple of bookshops.
After wandering around the market it was time for the Jade museum to open. It has a distinguished new modernist position on Democracy square and has decided to charge foreigners 15 dollars each to visit it.
However a visit here should be part of every museum curator's course as a dreadful example of how to get it wrong. None of the exhibits are labelled. Total reliance is on interactive screens designed by morons. If it wasn't such a pitiful waste of resources it would be laughable. As it is, despite the best efforts of the very helpful staff, the result is a stultifyingly dull and repetitious experience languishing over no less than five floors. This is enhanced by having to view the exhibits in crepuscular gloom despite jade being totally unaffected by light. An audio guide is worse than useless as it provides only puerile descriptions of the obvious. If only they had spent a fraction of the money on a more compact conventional display and allowed the magnificent exhibits to become the centre of attention, the result would have been infinitely better.
The same criticism does not apply to the museum of art and design, which deployed its exhibits in a far less distinguished space but to much better effect.
Later in the afternoon we found a cheap mobile phone which the salesman kindly activated for us, and a waterproof map. So tomorrow we are all set to venture into the interior.
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