Our past week has been very quiet, Cass again a Framingham "widow" while today another course enters its second week. Our lecturer is insisting on a constant return of work, very hard to cope with when you work all day as well. As he says "If you want to study this way (at night) then you have to put up with the workload" Anyway, it will all be over soon, till next time!
We saw some brain dead entertainment on the weekend, about all we could cope with was Shanghai Knights with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. Chan contorted himself in some amazing choreographed martial arts/ dance routines, and it was light and bright and funny. We were glad in a way that "The Hours" doesn't start till today...we'll save that treat till next weekend. Who am I fooling......I loved "Shanghai Knights"!!
Aussie dramas "Dead Letter Office" with 'our' Miranda and "The Interview" were DVD finds on the way back from the cinema. I washed the scooter after talking all about scooters in the last entry, so now it's eminently 'stealable' again! If you're reading this, how about sending us an email?....we can count on the fingers of a three-fingered man our regular correspondents! Duty calls......bye for now.

We don't know how we got around before we had our scooter (well actually we do: we caught the train or walked or caught a cab) but it's been a great help to us in finding our way around the city and to places further afield, like the beach and the national parks. But some of the sights we see should be noted, as we've become a little blasé about them. For example, on our way into town today (to see some Matisse paintings......we didn't, but that's another story!) we saw some "normal" scooter sights here in Taipei.
Scooters have a special spot at the front of every intersection and it's not uncommon to have scooters 20 abreast and at least 15 deep at major intersections. When the lights change we all just give our bikes full throttle and sort out our places as we go along. It's very frightening at first......sometimes it still is, when you're in the middle of this pack on a scooter going 70 km which feels like 120! It is usual to see whole families on a scooter: Mum, Dad and a couple of kids, one of the kids usually crouched on the "floor" area between rider and handlebars. We once saw a tiny baby wedged in between kid 2 and Mum and dad making 5 in total!
Today, we saw a girl doing her homework on the back of a scooter, leaning her papers on her boyfriends back as he rode along; dogs riding along are very common, calm as you like in the traffic and noise and general mayhem. The dogs sometimes stand on their hind legs to get a better view! Another terrible distraction is the habit of many girls to wear mini skirts with long boots, but Cass doesn't seem to notice them(!) Of course, even if our bike is going flat out there are always a few boy racers who'll whiz past us in the blink of an eye on an illegally modified bike.
We duck and weave through traffic, inside and outside buses and cabs. We fly along the narrow corridors between the inside lane and parked cars, always wary of drivers opening doors, or taxis that will cut straight across in front of a scooter if they spy a fare.
Anyway, we did arrive home safely again after another trip to town on the scooter. The Matisse, I hear you ask? The line was sooooo long we couldn't bear the thought of the wait, so maybe next time.

We're into the home stretch of our Chinese New Year break now and we've had a good time except for cassy getting sick(see below) Just today we put the bike through its paces up to Yangminshan national park and some parts of the road were so steep that we could have hopped off the bike and walked faster! However, we eventually forced the poor little thing to the top where we enjoyed a nice breather in some open air and nice scenery.
We eked out Mum's clippings package over many breakfasts this holiday and it was great...sometimes the best part of the day. As we haven't been at school since last Thursday, there may well be more awaiting us. I finished the 7th course in my Masters last Wednesday and am "looking forward to" the next one almost back to back to begin on Feb 17 for another two weeks. Many people have gone away here so we haven't seen many people around and most businesses only re-opened today. It's been interesting to finally see Taipei slow down a little. We have plans to go to our favourite Thai restaurant "Bird" tomorrow and I bought a pair of Giorgio Armani jeans the other day;very slick!
Cass continues the letter below.......

We've had a pretty quiet week as I came down with a bit of a stomach bug on Monday and that knocked the stuffing out of me (literally!!!) Nothing serious but I spent a couple of days in bed (reading/sleeping) or on the lounge ( watching dvds or crap tv). The next day I felt ok but it was freezing and raining, so I didn't vary the routine much - just different proportions (not so much sleeping!). David was very good and went to the gym each day and he did the shopping on Blackie, as we were running out of staples (coffee).
Today we went "out for some air" downtown on the MRT to Taipei Main station ( you know the one!). We had a look around and ended up buying the "Mad Max" dvd and Queen's "Jazz" cd : we'd each had a hankering for one of those - you can tell who wanted which one! (although we'll both enjoy the other's choice too!) What we really had to do was to go to the tax office, which is quite near there. I'd had to go there last year to PAY extra tax (!!!) but this time it was to fill in the forms for a REFUND (yay!). It's quite a complicated situation - to do with their tax year being a calendar year and me starting at TAS (where I don't have to pay tax because I teach Middle School, not PRE-school.... you get the idea) . Anyway it all seems to have panned out the way it was supposed to and I'll get LETTER in about THREE or FOUR MONTHS telling me that my refund cheque is there ( in the Taipei tax office) ready to be COLLECTED !!!! Can you believe what an antiquated system it is? David reckons that it's to discourage people from bothering to collect their refunds - they didn't reckon on such a tightarse, did they? I'll fill in a few forms and make a couple of trips downtown for $1100 AUS !!
I was laughing this morning -we didn't have any orange juice for breakfast (Chinese new year the stocks in 7-11 had run out.) BUT we did have oranges! (Linda, Mr. Lee's daughter, from downstairs had brought up some lovely oranges for us for Chinese new year - the colour is symbolic of gold which is supposed to be lucky.) So I squeezed some fresh orange juice and thought of Grandma squeezing fresh juice every day for Grandpa - she could have it! It takes too long (and the oranges are too cumbersome to drag from the supermarket.
We found another great curry place downtown today and next to it was a pasta/pizza place that also looked good so we'll be back there for sure!