My mate from Minnesota, Chad and I did our major presentations for our course on Saturday morning. Much against our own better judgment and to our wives' horror we had more than a few "sherbets" on Friday night. Suffice to say, although the worse for wear, we bumbled through and actually got a very good grade. We have team taught now for 6 months and find we can bounce ideas off each other pretty readily (although a third grade audience is a tad more forgiving than our adult class of colleagues!)
Just a few more days and another course will be finished and Chinese New Year looms large. We have a week off for this local celebration and as it is a time spent with family, many businesses close, at least for a few days. If the weather is poor, at least we have a few DVDs to watch. We've been following our friend, Thurza's Italian adventures very closely through her terrific and informative emails. It has made us yearn a little for Caunes Minervois, as the village she is based in Italy, Barga, sounds VERY similar. She sounds like she's having a fabulous time.
We had a pretty quiet day yesterday as I didn't get home from "class" till after midday, and had expended most of the energy I could muster earlier in the day.
We had a great lazy morning reading each other clips from newspapers that my Mum (thanks Mum!!!) had sent. She sent a great collection, including what "our" kids from the Grammar got into at Uni. It was fun to see how they'd all gone and to pat ourselves on the back for 'teaching them all they know'!!
Our favourite restaurant downtown, "Aubergine" got a workout this afternoon for a very pleasant lunch, then we wandered around the French FNAC shop and wondered at some beautiful books and (of course) bought a couple of DVDs. The scooter zipped its way to the night market on the way back home and I made Cass buy some excellent sunglasses even though she said she didn't want them. I bought 4 pairs of socks for work from a street vendor and now we're home. Hope all are well.........we'll write again when we have something to say......don't forget to email us!

Last weekend, we took Sean and Steven to see "The Two Towers" on Sunday and had a lovely time with them. We rang up to see if they'd like to come (we took them to the first one and they enjoyed it) and they didn't hesitate to say yes when the idea was floated. They like the movies and it's easy and fun to take them occasionally.
The TV's changed since we went away - no more George Clooney on ER. Channel CM has disappeared into the ether... to be replaced with Animal Planet (one of the Discovery group). This is fine, as I had to stay up till 9 pm to catch a glimpse of George (I only ever made it on Friday nights!) and Animal Planet has the Aussie show Animal Doctor (??I think, something like that; anyway it has Lochie Daddo and some girl with black hair co-hosting it). The show airs at 6pm (can stay awake for this one!) BUT.. it often has emotionally distressing and/or gory scenes, just when you're trying to eat dinner!!! So we're in 2 minds about this - although just hearing some Australian and seeing some "normal" space is quite exciting for us. (by Cassy)
Sunday night sees us at the end of a great and relaxing weekend. We had our usual fairly busy week and Carl and I had a few beers on Friday night at a quiet bar called the 'wow-wow' near our place. It was our 15th wedding anniversary on Thursday and we had planned to go to one of Taipei's fancy restaurants as a special treat. We were so well prepared in fact, that we had bought a book called "Taipei's 100 best international restaurants" and looked through until we found one that really appealed. We chose the Italian one that came in 2nd overall. Anyway Thursday night found us both a little tired so we postponed it till Sat night. The decor was OK but nothing special, the service exceptional and the food first class. The fillet steak with mushroom sauce I had was THE most delicious steak I have ever eaten....this is no exaggeration. After a $70 bottle of wine (one of the cheapest on the menu!) the night certainly was not cheap, but a wonderful experience for us both. It didn't quite match the 10th (Paris), so I'll have to work on something grander for our 20th!!
Sunday, we lazed around and listened to the start of the cricket(3 hours earlier here) before we took off on the scooter for a whiz down to the movies to see "Catch me if you can". I didn't have any great expectations, but Di Caprio was perfectly cast and Tom Hanks worked effortlessly under Spielberg's direction. An excellent fun movie.
I'm starting another Master's subject tomorrow, so I'll be pretty quiet for a couple of weeks. See you!

First week down in semester 2 and it was a bit tiring after our break.
Sorry about not catching up with everyone during our 2 weeks back home.....the main reason being laid low with a dreaded "plane lurgy"for the whole first week!! Yes, pretty much except Christmas day, we both sat around the house with a box of tissues feeling sorry for ourselves. We got to watch plenty of cricket which was good, but didn't get too much drinking and being merry done at all.
The second week was much better, we managed to get to the beach more than a few times and catch up with family, but it certainly didn't leave a lot of time for much else. We'll see you in June/ July!
Back in Taiwan, we're certainly back in the swing of things and looking forward to a wintery weekend. The temp has dropped quite dramatically here, so much so that we needed to buy a little blowing heater the other day. It's not terribly effective in our large living space but it takes the edge off.
We've missed eating our Chinese noodles and plan to go and eat them quite soon; no doubt a very good idea, as I for one found that someone had snuck into our place while we were away and substituted my roomy pants for these really strange tight ones!! Oh well, we enjoyed our hamburgers, pies and chips for a while.
Will write again after the weekend if we do anything worthwhile mentioning!