It’s the start of the second week back at work and the relaxed feelings we began with last week are slowly fading. There’s just enough “chill” lingering to make some of those quirky work thingies seem very far from important. Lots of people have asked about our holiday and seem quite fascinated with the whole deal, being that little bit further afield from the usual holiday destinations here in Asia. The boys have enjoyed seeing the little videos of the surf as that’s given quite a good idea of what it was like.
Ross and I made an ill-advised trip to the surf here last Monday, but we decided to go very early on Saturday morning to get the best of the conditions. This tactic seemed to work as the waves were quite presentable and we had a very enjoyable surf.
The night before had provided us with another first here in Taipei and that was watching the one day cricket! Much to my surprise, I eventually found a site that would stream the cricket over the internet. Frequent readers of this blog will recall that I had searched for a long while for this service and had many upgrades done on the computer to support it to the maximum degree possible. Suffice to say, I had crossed every hurdle but the last one, when the American site refused to let me buy a package. They were not authorized to sell to Asia and there was no hiding the IP address of the computer. Half way through the 1st game and feeling very annoyed as the game began to unfold without an opportunity to watch it, we found an English site which will stream the VB series at 10 pounds a pop ($23 A!!). The system worked beautifully on Friday night and we loved seeing the Aussies beat the Sri Lankans (even though we have more than a soft spot for the Sri Lankans now!) and I was able to wirelessly beam the video and the sound from the computer through to the TV in the other room. Sunday’s game proved to be very frustrating however! No matter how ramped up your computer is, or how fast your connection (ours is 3M now), if there are lots of other users, it will slow down the stream. Sunday afternoon and evening is prime time for internet use and although the audio streamed beautifully, the video broke up into a quick succession of still shots. It was so frustrating! Anyway, we’ve decided to just target the games on weekdays from now on. We’ll miss heaps as they start at 11.30 Taipei time while we’re at work, but we’ll catch a few hours after work.
Don’t take your cricket for granted please! $23 a game, picture pixilated and cutting in and out, Sky Sports from England putting their own ads in, but mercifully, taking the Australian commentary. You know, I’ve often said that if they had the cricket here, I wouldn’t need to come home: however, it will have to improve a lot before I want to take out citizenship!!
Both Cass and I are very tired being back at work after a couple of weeks of late breakfasts, sun lounges, beaches, pools, curries, seafood and lots of sleeping. We celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary today and we had a very scrumptious dinner at Wendel’s on Saturday night as tonight we had meetings and a very romantic date with the garbage truck! (That’s another thing you shouldn’t take for granted…lugging heavy bags of foul smelling detritus to the next block, waiting with your neighbours and then slinging it into the back of a truck very quickly loses its appeal!)
I said to Cass as we left for work this morning, “Who would have thought 18 years ago that we’d be here planted in Taipei in 2006? You probably wouldn’t have married me!”
What do you think?!