arty cats


The working week started on Monday with a professional development day, which meant that meetings with colleagues and brain draining activities like marking and filing and organizing and planning took the place of equally tiring, but the heaps more entertaining option of teaching kids. The rest of the week for both Cass and me was pretty stock standard, but we ended the week with a bit of a celebration.

The board of the school hosts a party at the American Club each year, ostensibly to thank the teachers for their contribution. Amongst many others, unfortunately, we didn’t feel in the mood, as the board’s attitude to money spending has meant that my contract is not being honoured and I am not being compensated in money or time as to the terms of my contract and other people have separate, yet related, issues. We took the opportunity of the thinning out of the faculty ranks to go to a restaurant, Pizza Realto, which features delicious wood fired pizzas, yet is usually overrun with other teachers. We invited Carl and Hiroko and took along a bottle of Veuve Cliquot that we bought at Sydney Airport on the way back across. We wanted to celebrate the sale of our unit at Horizons and also toast Carl’s birthday from the day before. Our pizzas were very tasty and the champagne was superb.

Ross and I got some good waves at the rocket on Saturday and I was stoked to do a tail slide back down the face of a wave for the first time, before spinning the board back around and continuing. Who said you can’t teach an old surfer new tricks?! One fascinating cultural experience we crawled past in the car was the tail end of a coastal duathlon. The run-bike-run concept had been well subscribed; the explosion in biking popularity here recently has been nothing short of amazing. The most amazing thing was the standard of equipment that all competitors had. The most ordinary athletes in terms of speed, ability and endurance still had the very latest, hi-tech, very expensive, top of the line bikes and other gear. I never had gear of the equivalent standard, even when I was quite obsessive about my competition a decade or so ago!
On the way back we called into Coombsy’s place, as he was hosting the AFL grand final get together. There was a great group of guys there and we screamed and yelled and did all the usual stuff as we enjoyed a grand final, which was much more of a contest than in recent years.

Cass and I saw Cinderella Man this morning sandwiched between the Cinderella stories of this year’s NRL preliminary finals. Who would have guessed that the Tigers and the Cowboys would fight this year’s decider?
Russell Crowe did a very good job in this film. It is a bit formulaic and predictable along the “Rocky” lines of such boxing/underdog/hardship movies, but it bore the distinctive imprimatur of Ron Howard and subsequently was very polished. I found the fight scenes quite dramatic and especially interesting, considering my recent flirtation with boxing training, which continues most days after school.
Cass goes off to camp tomorrow and won’t return until next Friday. Neither of us enjoys this time of year and she is madly preparing and packing right now.My sister Helen has done some remarkable work for me this past couple of weeks. My stolen camera needed replacing, but I needed the exact model for use with the underwater housing. Of course, a newer model has replaced it, so I asked Helen to seek one on Ebay. After a few false starts she scored a beauty that I’ll receive soon. Here was an Aussie buying a camera in America and shipping it to a third party in Taiwan, the Aussie in Taiwan electronically sending the money to Australia so that it could be sent to the U.S. Phew! Some newer ones should replace the photos from the vault soon. Cats feature today, one with Cassy, and one where I have tried some artistic brushstroke techniques on them with some photo software….. doesn’t really work, but it’s different!

cassy and cats

busted!

lewy's horse has some success


I've had some vicarious pleasure this week as Lewy's horse, Drizzle, followed its maiden win with a solid second on Friday afternoon. We were like a 1940's family huddled around the radio, this time sitting around the computer as it beamed a live call from the back blocks of some Victorian cow paddock all the way into Lewy's classroom in Taipei.
Ross and I paid a few bills for the car this week and celebrated our new carpark by paying a re-issued speeding fine...just pay $1700NT and you get not one but two colour pictures of your car doing illegal things (in this case speeding!)
The week has been hotter than hot and we've again spent most of it cloistered indoors near some artificial cooling machines. We've hopped from school to home and hardly ventured anywhere in between...it's just been shockingly oppressive. We enjoyed the footy this weekend, had some takeaway pizza on Saturday night and Ross and I drove over the mountain to be greeted by flat conditions at the beach before turning around and coming straight back.
The air has taken on an amazing, very un-Taiwanese quality this week. Almost as if you've put a pair of prescription glasses on, the world has come into sharp relief. Some strange, climactic force has sucked away all the pollutant haze and Taipei has suddenly become a searing bright sunfilled canvas. It's very reminiscient of home and quite disconcerting...I don't really want to see our cityscape so clearly, thanks all the same! No doubt, the gloom will descend again soon and everything will return to normal.
Not much to report this week: we're both working hard, hiding from the heat and enjoying our lot. Adios!

Virg'n Mary on their weekend viewing chairs

Pillbox two days before the "incident"


The feelings of anger and invasion of privacy after a robbery are no different wherever you are. We’ve had stuff taken in Australia and had all our stuff stolen in France one New Year’s Eve and those same feelings came flooding back to us mid week. Ross and I had just enjoyed perhaps the best surf we’d had for months at the Pillbox, straight after work on Wednesday. I’d been in two minds about going out, because the 3rd grade Open House was on that evening, starting at 7pm. I had a niggling feeling that we should leave in plenty of time to get back, just in case there were more horrendous traffic jams than usual (you have to budget for being stationary for at least 15 minutes of an hour trip!).

Great long lines of swell greeted Ross and me, puffing offshore breezes and of course, being the Pillbox, our “secret” place, no one in the water. The day was bright and clear and at least 3 sets of wedding couples in full regalia had come to the shoreline with their photographers to get their pre-wedding shots. I’ve mentioned this strange phenomenon before: photos before the day, in full dress, often dragging dresses over rocks and dirt, and sitting in the shallows to get that perfect romantic shot in the weakening afternoon sun.
We walked past the wedding parties and paddled out enjoying quite a magical afternoon. We both got a succession of fantastic waves and commented that except for the water quality, it was almost as if we’d been dropped off by a yacht charter somewhere in Indonesia to enjoy perfect waves with no crowds.
Our euphoria was short-lived however. I came in first to be greeted by a smashed out passenger window and all our things stolen. They even stole our clothes! We were upset about that as well as we had good clothes on as we’d come straight from school. Curiously, they left our shoes and socks, possible because they’d be too big for anyone. We walked around the area in the vain hope they’d dumped the stuff they couldn’t use, but we didn’t find anything. They stole our wallets and we both had lots of cash. We had the usual full quiver of credit and cash cards and other things that you have in wallets that are hard to replace. The big items taken were Ross’ good watch, his phone and my new camera. They took both of Ross’ bags but left my ratty beach bag, which had a secret pocket containing my phone. This was the only thing of value that they didn’t steal.

We drove home just in our wet board shorts and on the way, we got Cass and Ainsley to begin the card canceling process. I continued that when I got home and just before racing off to my parent night, I asked Cass to tell Mr. Lee to change the locks, as my address was in the wallet too! I had to wait at home till 11 am the next day when the locksmith came, secretly hoping that I might hear a key in the lock and be able to nab the perpetrator. That would have been very satisfying!

I’ll get a re-issued credit card tomorrow and a cash card mid-week, but I’m really spewing about the camera. I didn’t take the underwater housing out that day, so it’s still sitting here forlornly at home! I would love to replace it with the same model, which the housing is custom built for. It took such great photos the one time I got to use it; it would be a shame to never get it wet again. The rest of the week was a bit of a blur of police stations and getting the window fixed on the car and remembering all the things that were in my wallet or bag as I missed them through the week. The cops were pretty silly really and no help at all, insisting that we had to go out to the Damshui station to report the theft and get the car dusted for prints; we decided to cut our losses and get the window fixed instead, especially as another typhoon was on its way.

Two shining bright moments came this week to lift the gloom of the robbery: firstly we got our long awaited car park in the school parking basement after being on the waiting list for 2 years and secondly, we got word that our investment property at Horizon’s had finally sold. The news of settlement was treated with scant regard until we saw the money in our bank account, which we did on Thursday. What an amazing ordeal this had been: over the last 4 years the thing had contracts prepared on it no less that 4 times, various other offers were made and withdrawn, the company first refused to pay the rent and then after years of delays went belly up owing us and everyone else. It was a very painful period for us, a very unprofitable period and a period we’re very, very glad to put behind us. Enough said!

Anyway after an eventful week, we’re both glad that it was only property that was taken and that no one was hurt and I’ve been quite Zen like in my approach to the whole matter. I don’t know if I’m turning soft, but I hope that the person who took all our gear actually needed it: I’d be disappointed to imagine some tosser just doing it for fun, more philosophical about things if someone felt they had to do this sort of thing to survive. Unlike home, there are a lot of people here in just such a predicament.Photos will be from the vault for a while…I have plenty that I’ve taken lately which I transferred to the computer.

typhoon talim damage

moca

MOCA, Taipei

Typhoon Talim lashed away at the northern tip of Taiwan on Wednesday night prompting a school closure on Thursday. Much to our horror the winds peaked in the night with some quite terrible force, rattling doors, sheeting rain at crazy angles and generally huffing and puffing with fearsome gusts through the night. Our fear turned to relief and then delight the next morning as the rain and wind eased and the afternoon was left free for another adventure to the coast for the intrepid surfer boys. Our gale force wind dip into Damshui was completely reversed on Thursday when the Pillbox delivered beautiful strong offshore surf. It was quite a tonic for we long suffering surfers: the waves were fantastic, yet the water quality left just a little to be desired as silt from the river limited the water visibility to the extent that we couldn’t see our boards as we sat on them.

Cassy had a professional development day on Friday, where she lunched at a private club and then drank quantities of Moet et Chandon to celebrate the arrival of her principal’s first grandchild. Ostensibly the day was to look at scoring of tests or some such, but…I had a much more boring day as I dragged myself in to school for the longest day on record. This day set the world record for a workday: I swear it took at least 15 hours to complete! We charged over the mountain to catch the tail end of the swell, but we found little more than a blown out ripple.

Knowing that Saturday held no prospects for a wave, we headed down to the Taipei Contemporary Art gallery. We hadn’t been for ages and they had a fascinating exhibition on. Housed in a most beautiful old renovated building from the days of Japanese imperialist excess, the museum is such a haven from the bustle just outside. On our way, we took 5 paintings to be either re-framed or framed for the first time. Some mold had begun to affect the mats on paintings we’d brought with us and we also wanted to frame the etching on silk we bought from a street vendor in Vietnam. “Our” man at Chientan charged us the princely sum of about $120 A for all 5 jobs, which we can pick up in a week. Anyway, back to the MOCA, Taipei. There were some truly fascinating video installations that were extremely innovative. We didn’t quite “get” all of them, but the general sense was that Taipei’s contemporary art scene could be as spectacularly alternative as anywhere else! We enjoyed a couple of hours there before lunching at a very Parisian inspired café linked to the museum. Our lunch was quite delicious, but we spied a special takeaway cake when we were paying the bill. They had made tiny little croquembouches, which were an individual size copy of our wedding cake! We bought two to take home and they were most delicious.

This morning, Carl and Ross and I did a ring around to see who was interested in going for a surf. The swell had picked up again, the first waves of another typhoon headed this way. This one will just bring very annoying torrential rain as it veers towards Japan and we hold very little hope of another closure (!). We ventured to the rocket and I christened the underwater housing that goes with my new Sony camera. I had given it many tests in basins and showers etc. but this was the real deal! It performed very well and took some great shots, which I’ll put on the pointy over the next couple of days. That excitement over, I came home this afternoon so we could watch the Knight’s game together on TV. What a game! We were jumping around the lounge room, Virg’n Mary were perplexed at all the shouting and the Knight’s showed how well they would have gone in the semis…ah well, next year. Cass rang Chris for Father’s Day today and he was very chipper. I had a few thoughts about my own father today and thought he’d be quite interested in what we’ve been doing in the last few years and would probably quite like many aspects of our life here in Taipei. We continue to feast on our clippings from the Herald that Mum sends over, the last package arriving quite conveniently, just before the weekend. Must away to batten down the hatches and seal the exits ready for the next big blow!

lunch in Paris?

Chientan frame shop