We’ve had a magical four days off this Thursday through to Sunday because of the American School’s Thanksgiving holiday. As is usually the case when we get to this point, the holiday was dominated by lots of relaxing and sleeping in as, unlike back home, we’ve been going pretty solidly since the start of August without a break. Teachers who read this blog will know what I mean, and I’m sure all others who deal with hundreds of different personalities everyday will know: it’s not really the physical, but the mental sapping of energy that accumulates over time. Anyway, suffice to say, we’ve had a good break and we feel great!

I was keen to get some surfing in if at all possible on either Thursday or Friday or both to take advantage of the lack of others in the water. Dan rang and we discussed possibilities of a previously unsurfed rocky ledge called Green Ball (for the rather large satellite tracking stations on the bluff in the shape of big green balls!), but the tide and wind were all wrong so we made plans to meet at 6.30 the next morning. Cassy and I had long planned to tidy up and “re-decorate” our study, and make the most of what could be a really pretty and relaxing room. It’s ironic in a way that we like this room so much because we just spent weeks back home blowing away our study to give us some more bedroom and storage space…I don’t really get it either! Anyway, we found lots of stuff to get rid of including stacks of Taipei foreigner magazines reaching to the roof on our shelves along with surplus wires and leads and old clothing waiting to be transported to the charity bin. We also re-located bags of kitty litter which were blocking the under desk area and finally got rid of piles of boxes of computer goods (just in case I ever needed them again: a definite legacy from my Dad!). This whole process is easier said than done of course: no convenient rubbish bin for us. We sorted what we could for the recycling lady across the street then I looked up my character dictionary to write “operational” in Chinese on the printer and sundry other pieces of equipment we were shedding. Then off shopping! HOLA was just about empty and we breezed through the car park and into the shop. We prevaricated over various mats and rugs, eventually settling on a Japanese one which, although man made, feels and looks like the finest softest Merino wool…it’s just unreal! We got a new office chair for the desk and moved Dad’s old leather chair from the bedroom in to the study. After moving the computer and filing cabinet and shoe cupboard all around and tidying everything up, we’ve got a really comfortable work area again; no excuse now for not doing that Chinese study. After that I drove Cass down to Chili’s in the Miramar building: we felt like real civilized people not pulling up on a scooter for once and had an excellent tasty and filling meal.

We were exhausted after all this cleaning, moving, shopping and decorating but I still struggled out of bed at 6 to meet Dan for a trip over the hill. We got to Jinshan only to discover that while it was a reasonable size, the extra drive round the coast to Green Ball would not have been worth it as the swell drops by about ½ as you go round the tip. Instead, after checking the usual spots we headed back to a previously unsurfed but often longingly gazed upon spot north of Jinshan point. The reason it has never been ridden is that it only starts to work at about 4-5 foot and breaks very quickly onto nothing but huge boulders! To read the full story and more pics check pointyhat story here. I’ve nicknamed the place Kamikazes and we don’t really expect to see anyone else surf there…it was a bit hair-raising.
Saturday dawned on great excitement for me, yet I still managed to contain this election fever long enough to sleep in quite late. Cass went off and did some food shopping, I fiddled around on the computer in the new study, and then we took a bus downtown for a walk around. We saw a rather frequent sight here in Taipei: that of lazy dog owners taking their dog for a walk while they ride a bike. Even worse is the dog owner who rides the scooter while taking the dog for a walk/run, but that’s another story. This dog was sprinting down the street wearing special little dog shoes which clip-clopped along like a tiny horse…it was pretty funny!
Back home to election night, starting Taipei time at 3pm. We both love election night, the analysis and excitement, the revelations and elation and disappointment. It’s a great real life drama played out publicly for a few hours every three or four years where election nerds and election junkies like Antony Green and Kerry O’Brien strut their stuff. I was glued to the set for the whole telecast and we both really enjoyed it. I won’t politicize this blog with my views on the result: everyone knows where we stand politically, but I will say that one impediment to us returning home to live one day has been removed.

Sunday was another possibility for a beach run, but again, strong winds had ruined all the breaks on both coasts according to some rudimentary forecasting and checking of charts and cams. After (again!) sleeping in, and I don’t know how we’ll get up at 6 tomorrow, we lazed around till we took off for the movies at around midday. Before we went up I bought a silicon case for my iPod Touch and a “USB fridge” a novelty appliance that you can plug into a USB port that keeps a can of drink cold! I know this sounds a little ridiculous, but I justified the purchase by using some gift vouchers that some students gave me last year. I still reckon everyone at work will be jealous and covet my tiny fridge when they see it (or maybe they’ll take that as final confirmation that I’ve lost my mind).
After watching the movie “Before the Devil Knows You’re There” I’m glad that I went in a pretty upbeat state of mind. The characters were distinctly unlikable, the story gob-smackingly horrifying and it reeled from one disaster to the next. It was graphic in its telling of a robbery gone wrong and the human tragedy that unfolded before during and after the main event. The leads, however unlikable, were superb in their roles and the movie was a masterpiece from that veteran director (no, he’s not dead), 83 year old Sidney Lumet. It certainly had undertones of that other Lumet classic “Dog Day Afternoon”.
Anyway, a long winded blog today, probably lucky for you we don’t get 4 days off every week! Photos: various shots of the new room, running "horse" dog and Cassy and David at “Thai Town” after the movie today.

Even though we awoke to a stellar weather day on Saturday, the sun beating down from unclouded skies made us a little wary of a day at the beach. Readers of this blog will remember our beach umbrella being shredded a while back and we haven’t, as yet, sourced a replacement. The fact that the surf was nearly non existent made up our minds.

After a latish breakfast we decided to pack a little bag of stuff and take the train to Damshui at the far end of the MRT line, but headed, unusually for us, away from town. Armed with sun cream and a pair of sunnies each (a rare event as the sun rarely blazes away here like it does in Australia…we can step out of the terminal in Sydney on occasions and nearly burn out the back of our retinas, but that’s another story!) The train trip there and back is part of the entertainment. It takes about ½ an hour each way and very quickly the city fades into surprising rural scenes. It never fails to amaze how tiny little farm plots nestled in beside the railway in that little wasteland that’s usually not used seem to be bursting with bounty: very carefully tended by conical hatted folk, much like I imagine has been happening for 100s of years. Yet, as we watch them, we’re cocooned in this slick metal air-conditioned bullet hurtling past to and from a very different reality.

Arrival at Damshui is a pleasure as the station is large and welcoming and leads to a wonderfully re-vamped foreshore park with lawns and trees and wide open pathways leading to the riverbank. One interesting addition since we last visited are the dueling donut megastores trading straight opposite each other on the promenade…Taipei’s latest fad and I’m sure a great money-spinner for Mister Donuts, Dunkin’ Donuts and others. The crowd here is always immense and confronting, but the riverside boardwalk is pretty much able to handle a great crowd these days.

All the fun of the fair is available here and stall and shop after shop were hawking their games and amusements. Shoot the balloons with a very realistic looking revolver, manipulate the claw to get a soft toy or collar a Wii with your hoop…it’s all part of the fevered Damshui riverside carnivale. Many stalls have another curiously Damshui phenomenon: giant inflatable toys! You can pick from a brutal looking mace, a massive hammer or from a selection of human sized bottles of beer or soft drink. The other Damshui staple is the ice cream that is so ridiculously tall that it is about to topple over. Gaggles of schoolgirls try to lick the ice-cream down from silly heights after daring each other to get a bigger and taller one: it’s quite hilarious to watch and many hit the boardwalk to be a melted mess for the passing parade to dodge. We sought some solace from the sun in a brilliant trendy little restaurant bar straight opposite the ferry wharf to Bali (yes, really!: it’s on the opposite side of the river!) and were able to sip some San Pellegrino and watch the passing parade. We had a scrumptious lunch of lamb chops (me) and steak Porcini (Cassy) with various befores and afters. As is tradition for the hordes, we walked to the end of the wharf then cut through to the main street behind which was even thicker with people and events: it’s a struggle just to make it back to the train! We were a bit exhausted by the time we got home but had a very entertaining day. Cassy was sick of her hair and decided she needed a cut: who cares if it was Saturday night?! One of the joys of the big city: it seems everything is always open.

Sunday was a bit dreary in comparison and we hummed and haaed about what we might do before deciding to take a drive to the east coast for a change. Through Neihu and eventually onto the first of three expressways we made our way through that 13 km tunnel amongst other tunnels and elevated road systems. It’s like you’re driving a miniature car through a vein in a body: there’s no way out and no turning back just kilometre markers and an eerie voice from the speakers that tells us all sorts of information we can’t understand: I’m glad I’m not claustrophobic!
Wushi’s surf was terrible but after checking a few spots up the road, we settled on Dasi. It wasn’t very pleasant for Cass, hunkered in the car in the rain, but luckily she’d thought to bring a magazine along so wasn’t too badly off (or so I told myself as I joined the little group out at the point). Check the Pointyhat story here for some details and photos. Our trip home was slow as can be: Taiwanese drivers tend to slow to a very annoying crawl at the first sign of a bit of a drizzle and that combined with the Taipei hordes trying to get back to the city on a Sunday evening made for a long tedious drive. I must admit, I nearly sacrificed doing this blog tonight, but thought if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it at all.

Short week for us this week as we celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday and Friday (I never thought I’d say this phrase but, “Thank you America”!). We’re looking forward to the break. Photos: Damshui boardwalk pics, the trendy little restaurant, the seething hordes and “Octopus anyone”!

Wal and I had a few of Diamond Tony’s special long glasses of Erdinger on Friday night and had a real social time as various guests dropped in for a drink and a chat. Brandon joined us for a while before heading off to tea, and we had a few suspects from the upper school English department drop in before, just as we were about to leave (we’d called for the bill!) Lewy phoned up and said he’d join us. So, we stayed a little longer!

This was not the ideal preparation for the Saturday morning external admission tests, organized for the next day. Luckily, I’d got everything well organized in advance, even down to pencils and spare paper, and dumping it in the admissions office. I supervised the testing for some middle and upper school hopefuls and when those 3 hours were up, I actually felt I’d almost been up for a whole day. I must praise glowingly, almost certainly not for the last time, my new iPod touch: as I invigilated my hapless charges, I was able to wander round, or sit at the front reading the Sydney Morning Herald online and catching up with the live cricket updates. Cass was most impressed with my knowledge of current events when I returned home. Speaking of the cricket, owing to a rather annoying fact that vast times of our working days are actually spent working (!), we choose for this short test series, to just rely on the audio. ABC radio is blocked to certain areas of the world for certain sport broadcasts, but for just $20 I was able to purchase the rights for the whole summer. It’s quite a hoot to listen to the dulcet tones of Drew Morphett explaining the finer and more delicious points of his lunch while we’re eating a late brekky here in Taipei!

Joe the jeweler had emailed Cassy to come down for another “fitting” of her next ring (all will be revealed in January), so I decided to go down with her as we were handing over quite a reasonable sum of money. The bus clanked and bunny hopped the whole way as usual: the Taipei bus drivers haven’t undergone any amazing driving improvement in the last few weeks and we were disgorged a few blocks north of Taipei’s central area. After the fitting, which Cassy was pleased with, we wandered a few more blocks to re-visit some awesome Japanese “$2” shops, which defy the imagination. I suppose they’re a little bit like an Ikea warehouse for $2 junk and it is impossible to exit without a bagful of what seems at the time to be necessary and wondrous product, but when the bags are emptied at home, I often wonder what we were thinking! After that we wandered enjoying the Chungshan MRT station environs with its pleasant tree lined avenues just off the main drag and quirky restaurants and a plethora of trendy hairdressers. There are so many in a few blocks (at least 50) that we wondered how on earth they all survive.
MRT back home and Cass ordered some Alleycats pizza which I scootered down to retrieve: it was just sensational! Bit of TV and off to snoozeville…

Sunday set a new record: I slept in till 9.30! Cassy was even stirring before me and seemed amazed I was still in bed. After a wonderful lazy breakfast, we read the last of the Herald clippings from Mum today (we’d carefully eked them out for weeks while Mum was having her wonderful American opera, orchestra, culture tour) and I decided to head for the Pillbox. Cass had a fair bit of marking to do and the day was not terribly inviting, so I went over alone. Dan was keen to go, I discovered later, but had lost another mobile phone, so hadn’t got my message (he’s lost at least three of them…expensive hobby!)
The surf was just excellent and I stayed out for many hours till I got too tired of paddling against the usual strong rip. There is often a rather strong wafting and pungent smell here and I spied the source of the smell today…wandering up the road beside the foreshore was this corpulent pig!
Photos today are of hairdressers at Chunshan station, disgustingly fat pig at the Pillbox, the dancing Hawaiian girl that Ross and Ains gave us, now adorning the dash of the Auburgino and Cassy and David as they would appear on the Simpsons. This was a bit of a laugh for us: you submit a photo and make a few adjustments and you get what you might look like if you were on the Simpsons. I think they’re scarily authentic!

P.S. It was on this exact day, 5 years ago, that we started this blog. In those days, rather random, short entries were the norm, no photos, no videos, no links and a very basic layout. We often wish we'd started it earlier, say 15 months before that when we first arrived...we can barely remember how utterly strange and confronting we thought Taipei was! Here's the first entry copied below...

Monday, November 11, 2002
We've just started our web page to see how we go. Hopefully, this will be an interesting way for people to catch up with what we are doing.

Potato scallops gourmet style, melt in your mouth lamb ribs, beer battered fish and chips with aioli and tomato sauce, roasted vegetables and washed down with a couple of glasses of Wolf Blass 2004 cab sav…a menu possibility where else but Australia. Right? Wrong. You can also savour this feast on the massive arterial Ren Ai Road in the south east of Taipei’s downtown region. Another amazing discovery from internet and expat magazine online reviews, Mary’s café, featuring Australian cuisine, was our destination on Friday night. We had fun getting there catching a couple of trains and negotiating through a few backstreets to find it, including asking a few building guards if we headed in the right direction. Although we ate inside, it also has an attractive deck (fairly rare in Taipei) and an amazingly familiar menu…we really could have been back home somewhere. The chef spent 20 years in Australia working, amongst other jobs, with the Holden Racing Team! The restaurant has football jumpers of all codes in frames, showcases of model race cars and motorbikes, footballs on benches and of course, stuffed koalas and kangaroos…it was very cute and a really great find.

Still excited by our find the night before and a little weary after traipsing through the city after a fairly hectic working week, we got up relatively late on Saturday. I’d been up for only minutes (at 9am!) when Dan rang (he has a young family and had been up since 5…) asking if we were heading to the beach. I agreed to meet him over the hill in about an hour and a half, but as it turned out, he had some car trouble and couldn’t get out there. It was wild, wet and windy, the ocean at Pointies and the Rocket not dissimilar to a washing machine, but through the tunnel at the sheltered end of Green Bay were about 150 surfers! Cass and I couldn’t believe our eyes…these guys really know how to follow a crowd. The surf here was still abysmally awful, so we thought we’d take the long drive back round the coast to see if the Pillbox was working. On the way, we had a great drive: the coastline really is very beautiful on a lightly storming day: the wind snaps trees to and fro, the water is an icy, menacing grey and people in the little towns along the way seem to be experiencing an artic winter from the wooly balloon like parkas that seem to have appeared everywhere as soon as the temperature drops a couple of points. I must admit that the Pillbox, while offering a little puff of offshore wind and a half reasonable wave was just a little bit chilly! Have we turned Taiwanese? This development is rather strange: the real temperature is still relatively mild, but we’re finding ourselves wearing jackets and long pants in the day and hauling bed clothes up around our chins at night. Anyway, this epiphany is a little concerning to me…best get back to the surf. The surf was pretty good and the crowd, as usual at our “secret spot” was non existent, just the way I like it! On the way back we got some KFC for a late lunch as we were both starving and I flashed out a little more of my pathetic, rudimentary Chinese with surprisingly good results. The main trouble occurs when people start thinking you can actually speak Mandarin: my comprehension is limited to say the least! Oh well, small steps: I should take some of the advice I dish out to the poor little babies that I teach.

We’ve started to watch a DVD series that a guy at school has lent us and we watched a few episodes on Saturday night. It’s called “Teachers”, a BBC production and a real hoot. It started in 2001, but we haven’t seen any of it so as we have all 4 series here, it looks like keeping us entertained for a good while to come. We awoke to a dreary, dark Sunday, wind whipping spits of rain about; decidedly unpleasant conditions for any outdoor pursuit. What better time to see Ang Lee’s latest film, “Lust, Caution”? Set in Shanghai and Hong Kong in WWII, it had the Ang Lee fine patina of beauty lightly brushed through every scene. Quite seductive in its costuming and settings, the leading actors were gorgeous and believable in their roles. It was just a few ticks under three hours, but it could have gone on and on, it was a satisfying visual and emotional pleasure for us with ample nods to clever direction, cinematography and symbolism.

We strolled home through just a micro mist of rain, stopping off for another late lunch in the basement of Takashimaya, where we both had some Indian food. We walked back down the Shi Dong, but decided to stop at Ikari Coffee for a latte: it was very laidback inside, soothing sounds, great smells and cool décor. We sat in a couple of plush armchairs and got inspired to jazz up the study at home a little with dad’s big old chair (currently in the bedroom) and some better lighting. Oh well, maybe when we get a chance…!
A great weekend this, photos are of Taipei out and about at night, topped with us at Mary’s Australian café!