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.
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.