Screaming kindergartners crawl through a smoke-filled hallway, searching for the exit. Later in a room downstairs, they duck under a table as the floor shakes beneath them. Meanwhile, a dozen high school students clamber out a window and descend a fire escape.
These aren't scenes from an earthquake. This is the Taipei Fire Department's Fire Safety Museum (防災科學教育館). And by all accounts the kids love it.
"They also like playing with the fire extinguishers," Kang Jin-shan (康金山) , a museum guide, said of the thousands of students who visit each year to learn what to do when disaster strikes.
Taipei is known for its National Palace Museum, and exhibits at its Fine Arts Museum occasionally attract international coverage. Not so famous but in some ways more intriguing are the city's dozens of museums and galleries devoted to odd topics such as paper, contraband and old Chinese battles.
A few of these institutions would probably not exist if not for field trips and government subsidies, but many are worth a visit and offer unique perspectives on life in Taiwan.
Such as the museum for tap water. Yes, tap water.
The Taipei Museum of Drinking Water (自來水博物館) reopened in 2000 after NT$80-million worth of renovations. Its original attractions included a Baroque-style museum building that was built to house water pumps, and a collection of decommissioned valves, faucets and circuit boards.
The vintage technology is still inside the building, which was built in 1908 and is now a third-class historic site. On a recent visit, couples posed for wedding pictures outside while long lines of schoolchildren waited for a peek at 1950s Hitachi and Allis-Chalmers pumps under the museum's vaulted ceiling.
"In other countries, water treatment facilities aren't open to the public," noted Wu Neng-hung (吳能鴻) the museum's director.
But what really sets this place apart from the like-minded, but more sober institutions run by other government agencies is the result of the renovations. Wu said the complex attracted 330,000 visitors last year.
The adjacent Taipei Water Park (台北自來水園區) features hiking trails for grownups, a large jungle gym with slides and water cannons in a shallow pool, and a concrete stream that winds through gushing fountains and is safe enough for toddlers to wade in. The kids will have so much fun they won't even notice if they learn a thing or two in the new learning center.
"I hope that (visitors) will understand where tap water comes from," Wu said. "Every stage in the process is very difficult. Although our water is cheap, it's also very precious."
On the opposite end of the scale, in terms of size and utility, is the Miniature Museum of Taiwan (袖珍博物館), a private institution tucked away in the basement of a high rise on Jianguo North Road.
Unlike other museums that showcase models and replicas, the miniatures in this gallery are, as much as possible, made of the same materials used in the real-life objects they represent. The museum is the first of its kind in Asia and attracted 100,000 visitors last year, said guide Chen Sheng-yi (陳生儀).
Among the highlights is a replica of a 19th-century Californian mansion, which took an American who was getting his PhD in architecture four years to complete. Walls of the "Rose Mansion" are cut away to reveal scenes from domestic life: the master of the house entertaining a woman in the bedroom, a spread of desert and champagne on ice, a tiny pool table with billiard balls and a cue stick.
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