Wal and Shaun came round to watch the first semi of the NRL finals on Friday night while we waited for Coobsey to jet in from Hong Kong. Originally due in Tienmu at 7.30, he had missed his flight and now wasn’t expected until about 10. After the game we went down to the Green to wait for him and when he arrived the place was humming along quite nicely. It was an interesting experience for me as I am not drinking anything, because I’m taking some strong antibiotics. The volume rose, the crowd got sillier: it was really very entertaining! Coomba subsequently arrived and we had a great old chat for a few hours till I left him in Wal’s capable (?!) hands for the remainder of the evening.On Saturday, we toyed with the idea of meeting with him for brunch with a group of others, but decided that we couldn’t make it. Instead, after our usual weekend brekky of toast, coffee, lazing around and reading the Herald clippings from Mum, we decided to venture downtown to a Turkish place we’d found out about. It was pretty hard to find, tucked into a one way lane off the main roads, but it was surely worth it. The food was excellent and we both wolfed down our choices. I had Iranian chicken with salad and Cass had hummus with tahini, falafel and pida. Wow!! This place was fantastic and well worth the hike down. We even figured out after the event that there is an MRT station fairly near, so next time, on the train we go.
Today we decided to head over to the east coast but left our run a little late and the usual good run was marred by a stack of Sunday Freeway Drivers. This Taiwanese phenomenon appears after 10am on any given Sunday and proceeds to block all lanes of an otherwise excellent elevated road and tunnel system. In fact we crawled through 20km of tunnels averaging about 40 km/h! When we were spat out at Toucheng, we took about 15 minutes to go a couple of kilometers to the Wushi Harbour Wall where we planned to spend a few hours surfing, swimming and eating our picnic lunch that Cassy had made. There was some massive festival going on at Wushi Harbour, with great battalions of tour buses making an impenetrable wall up along the carpark. When we eventually spied the surf, we could not believe our eyes. Check pointyhat here for some amazing photos and a video. Looks like our previously underutilized surf haven is now well and truly on the Taipei trendies map. It is just an hours drive from Taipei central now as opposed to about an hour and a half to Jinshan, so I suppose it had to happen.
Anyway, we gave that the flick and went to the nearby “Taj Mahal” where the crowd was not much better. I got a few little waves, but had more success body bashing and we both enjoyed a swim even though the water was pretty warm. Cass sheltered under our brand new umbrella which lasted about 10 minutes before shredding itself in a light zephyr…oh well, can’t expect great things for $4! As we both huddled under the tiny shade footprint we thought we’d be better off saving our lunch for further along the coast. We stopped at a tidal pool area with some walking trails and lots of stalls selling all types of seafood (remember Chris and Val?). As we were just finishing our sandwiches perched on a rather rustic, Flintstonesesque rock outdoor setting, a skinny little waif of a cat came and cried for some food. On the way back we bought what we thought was just one fish to give the cat, but it turned out to be one plateful! The cat was nowhere to be seen, but we dropped off a brace of fat little fish for him to sniff out later.
We’ve had an absolute feast of football this weekend, with every semi of both NRL and AFL being shown on the Australia Network, so we’ve loved every minute. This is set to continue right up till the grand finals, so the weekends in September look pretty full already! Photos today include two at Sababa, one of the robust umbrella (!), a butterfly that Cassy took multiple photos of outside the Toucheng 7/11 and Chiang Kai Chek Concert Hall undergoing major restoration work with an amazing giant picture of it on the outside to hide the scaffolds!