Drinking German Erdinger beer in a big tall glass, lounging back in a garden courtyard with a view of the passing parade at 4 pm on a Friday afternoon... not bad! Josh and Gurecki and I were joined at stages by Carl and Rourkey, yet we were all home safe and sound before 8pm. It was a very pleasant afternoon, tempered slightly by a few pangs of jealousy. We’d checked the cam and had deliberately passed on what looked like a pretty good surf, only to be informed by Dan’s wife Nicky, that Dan was performing some pretty hot maneuvers out at Jinshan Point as we sat!
We thought we’d rectify the situation by making an early dash on Saturday. The flower festival is in full swing at Yangminshan and the cops start placing some very inconvenient detour barricades at 7.30, so we left at 7 and flew up past the cop shop in time to avoid this. The surf was a pleasant adventure as I took Josh over and Carl carted his mini-mal on his roof racks. Carl and I got a few nice ones before the tide started to fill up and the hordes descended. We were the first ones to surf the rocket, just under two and a half years ago, but it now suffers the tyranny of being in full view of the road. That reason, and the strange insistence of the local boys to call and text all their mates to come and join them at a good spot, has meant that our spot has become very crowded. Not that we’re complaining too much: it is their country! It’s just a shame that we keep discovering spots, riding them and then become inundated with everyone as the word gets around. We were in the water for over 2 ½ hours, so after the drive back, we were pretty tired. Cass and I had a subway lunch and we took it easy doing some shopping, watching episodes from the latest series of that train wreck show from Australia (deeply disturbing but strangely compelling!!) The Biggest Loser that I have downloaded recently.
We had a hankering to get down to Ming Sheng East Rd for some Turkish cuisine for tea so decided that the Saturday night scooter ride would set the heart racing and work up an appetite. The ride down was, as always, an amazing rush of sights and sounds and smells. Neon blurs and 125cc engines screaming away at their maximum rev capacities, Taiwanese girls hanging on like baby koalas on the back of the little thunderbolts and the ubiquitous flouting of every road rule in sight! Trouble was, when we got there: the all too often seen works in progress, spotlights in an empty shell as workman pulled the guts out of the place to change to something else…the Doner Kebab was gone! We were really disappointed and roamed the backstreets looking for an alternative. One such was O’Ginny’s, a tiny Irish pub replica, which serves some pub food as well as the usual liquid refreshments. We ordered some calamari and fish and chips, but left most of it on the plate as it was very heavy and filling and seemed quite oily. It was only during the night that this meal took its full toll, as Cass and I both got very upset stomachs. Cass seems OK but I’m still very delicate now. On the way home, we stopped to do a little plane spotting, but none were coming in to land as we watched. On the way out of the airport’s little back road, I spotted a line of gleaming Harleys! I had seen the odd one or two, but this seemed to be a little dealership: we just had to get a photo of that!
We had planned to see “Notes on a Scandal”, with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, but it was not on up here in Tienmu. We decided to see it relatively early on Sunday morning down at the Shin Shin cinema in the Regent hotel precinct. It was just superb: it’s so great to see great actors do their thing and these two were sublime. What a sad, frightening and tragic little story it played out for us…we were very pleased we’d traveled down to see it. When we got home, Cassy decided to walk down to Jason’s to get a few supplies and I lay on the lounge watching the Quiksilver Pro streaming live over the internet and then beamed on to our TV, while doing one of my audio Mandarin lessons: quite bizarre. Cassy has been very tired this whole weekend: she had parent conferences on Thursday and Friday all day and the constant talk and added stress have really caught up with her. Even now, she hasn’t completely recovered, which is a shame as we have to get back on that treadmill again tomorrow!
Photos are a portrait of Cassy with the cats, Dave on a wave (Josh took these close up shots with his SLR camera) on Saturday, Dave and Harleys and tiny little Cassy with her cousins…can you pick her? Cassy’s uncle took this shot and sent it on to Chris as he was digitalizing all his old photos.