Apart from watching the slow, agonizing and inexorable slide of the world’s greatest cricket team into at least the 3rd or 4th best, we did lots of other stuff this week. A week traditionally known for its cold and wet conditions, this week of enforced consumer holidaying, otherwise known as Chinese New Year, was remarkable for both the fine weather it turned ion and the increasing number of bigger establishments that stayed open, at least some of the time.Cass accompanied me out to the coast on both Tuesday and Wednesday as I surfed Green Ball on the north east and Pointies on the north respectively. Both times I met up with Dan and Cass had a great chat with Nicky while the kids roamed free! It’s great surfing with Dan: he has a real energy and excitement that brings out the best in me surfing wise, as I have to admit, since Ross left, I’ve never really recovered! It also helped that the surf was excellent on both days, helped by some generous and powerful swell. To check more of the Green Ball day, have a look at this link, and I even made a slide show of the Wednesday at Pointies, which you can see here.
As the week moved along, we luxuriated in our ability to stay up late and sleep in even later! No alarms and timetables lead to us very quickly re-adjusting our body clocks. We know we’ll have to pay for this tomorrow when the alarm goes off at 6 am again, but we’re living for the moment! Lemon butter for brekky, chicken soup for lunch and even apple cake with amaretto cream for tea…wow! How well we ate, all home cooked and delicious!
I wandered up to the gym on Thursday to hit the heavy bag and lift some weights and met Wal up there for a solid two hour session. The couple of cleansing ales turned into a couple more, but I still managed to bring home the KFC for dinner, so all was not lost. Cass and I went to the movies yesterday to watch the superb “Flashbacks of a Fool”. Whoever named this movie deserves to be shot, as I imagine many moviegoers would miss it just because of the very strange and unimaginative name. It was, however, first class, Daniel Craig and all the cast just mesmerizing. We ate out at Cassy’s favourite “Aubergine” beforehand, Cass giving her Florentine red leather jacket and Venetian glass heart a first outing.
Earlier in the day we trekked up behind the Veteran’s Hospital, through the tunnel and up the trail into the mountains beyond. The trail and steps were characterized by some rare for Taipei and rather beautiful sandstone formations and the track stretched up and farther up till we reached a pinnacle of sorts. Backtracking through another path eventually to a large popular temple, we continued yet farther, winding our way behind the temple and way down into the Beitou hinterland. Eventually disgorged from our mini wilderness in the back of Qiyan, we eventually made our way down to the station, where we MRTed back to Mingde and home.
Today, we had breakfast out at Jakes, meeting up with Wally’s mum and brother and Tina. We had a laugh and a half with them: Wal’s mum is certainly a larger than life character, a real crack-up! I think he was pleased to share the wear a little: sounded like she could talk the hind leg off a dog. We wandered down to Rourkey’s from there in a pristine sunshiney morning, just perfect weather. After that I went down to pick up the photos we’d finally selected to be printed, all 935 of them! Amazingly, this was only a “selection”, believe it or not. There are certainly some drawbacks from taking this camera around every week to take pictures for this very blog! Admittedly, we had left it rather a while: about 3 years. Cass has vowed never to let it get like this again. I’m not really fussed: I reckon if we have the electronic version, we don’t need the hard copies, but Cass is a real “hard copy woman”.
All in all, an absolutely brilliant break for us both, just what we needed after our fantastic, but very enervating romp through Italy just a few weeks ago. Photos: wilderness in the city, surf, Aubergine, cats and photos. Check the links for more surfing stuff if you’re keen.