This was a magic weekend after a rather long week! After a four day break, the usual 5 day week was a bit hard to handle. Wal and I and Gurecki met up with various friends along the route of next week’s “All Vics” bus trip on Friday night. I can’t help myself, it’s been pretty much planned like a military exercise, partly because I want things to run smoothly and partly as a counter balance to Wal’s “she’ll be right mate!” attitude! We visited the nine bars necessary and I passed over a “permission slip” of sorts giving them a vague idea of the times and numbers of people, in English and Chinese (someone helped me, obviously). Now I must report I went home a little early with a massive headache, so bad I could hardly talk or move my head and no…it wasn’t beer induced! I woke up that morning with a pinched nerve feeling in my upper back/lower neck and it just got worse and worse all night.On Saturday, the pain had eased a little so after one of our fine weekend mornings of lazy brekkys and reading of lots of Herald clippings courtesy of my Mum, we decided to put in place a few more beautifying items for the new study. Cassy, quite wisely, decided that I wasn’t up to surfing (and driving over there) as I could barely turn my head to the right. Instead, we decided to go looking for one of the exquisite hand made blue and white Chinese pots that we often see around. As chance would have it, we have a great pottery shop straight across Chung Shan Rd in our section that our visitors will remember. We edged and filled our way through tiny corridors of pot after pot, many precariously placed on endless series of shelves, some dotted along the floors and still others stacked on the rooftop! It’s a higgledy piggledy world of 4 floors and I really felt like a bull in a china shop and felt thankful to get out with no breakages. Cass decided on a very beautiful pot, we paid the girl and brought our treasure home. Next, off to the plant market! Cass thought we might go down to the megalithic flower market, but in my invalid condition, we decided to wander down to the Wen Lin Rd district to a very large nursery there. After dismissing 100s of orchids (mainly because I don’t like them particularly!) we decided on a very robust looking dieffenbachia. The princely sum of $NT150 was handed over (about $5) and we wandered back home on a bit of a circuitous route. We spied a replica French antique furniture store by the name of Carcassonne and thought that quite hilarious as it bore absolutely no resemblance to our home of some months years ago, the medieval walled town of Carcassonne in southern France.
On Saturday night we watched another great movie, this time Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in “American Gangster”. It was a bit of a slow burn, but when it got going it was totally engaging. One thing we both appreciated: even though the story was a bit hard to follow early on, the director (Ridley Scott) didn’t treat the audience like morons, which is a rare treat.
Sunday was an amazing weather day. We eventually hauled ourselves out to the beach where I had a great surf and Cass blissed out in the sun looking out over a blue sky (pretty rare), full sun not beating through a pollution haze (very rare) and an ocean that was clear and clean (extremely rare!). On our way to pick up the car, we nearly literally ran into one of our neighbours getting ready for a temple ceremony involving these big wooden demon like figures...only in Taiwan! Even though my neck is not cured, it showed some signs of improvement, so we thought the drive might be OK. As it turned out, due to the fact that we left at lunchtime, the traffic meant a pretty slow old trip anyway. Cassy made us a little picnic lunch of curried egg sangas and cokes, which we had looking out over before said beauty. We commented that we could have been back home sitting on our table down at Merewether beach, watching the world go by and nearly nodding off with a soft sun dancing a soporific warm beat on our backs.
Anyway, I’ll tell you what does give me a neck ache…this! So, I’ll stop now with photos of our satanic neighbour, Cass looking over the surf this afternoon, shot of the pots on the roof, me with plant in hand, Cass on the path home and the Taiwanese Carcassonne!