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!