As you can tell from the photos above, our weekend was full of opposites! Beautiful natural surroundings, plants growing wild and lush in the mountains while we strolled along a fast rushing stream and hiking up and down small hills and steeper slopes as we moved in and away from the river all the way up Yangminshan.Our Saturday was spent partly in pursuit of mountain trekking trails and we found lots of little offshoot paths from the one I had investigated a few weeks ago. The Macaque monkeys were not making their presence felt which I was thankful for, because I’d like Cass to accompany me every now and then if she feels like it. I’m petrified of our simian friends: that low guttural growl can actually turn into quite aggressive behavior if they’re intimidated in any way (like looking at them!), so I don’t think she’d be really keen on that. Truth be known, she’d probably be far braver than I am: I’ve never been real big on the “communing with animals in their natural habitat” bit!Anyway, I digress as usual. We had a wonderful hike along the river and exhausted ourselves really. Cass was particularly vulnerable as she had spent the past two days being very up with people, contending with an insistent push of parents in the quarter conferences. It’s quite exhausting trying to explain to some people, in the nicest possible way, that little Johnnie’s intellectual ability is a direct result of mummy and daddy combining all their very best DNA to make a new human. Can’t be done actually, just thought of, and that creates frustration of its own!
Sunday was a real blast as I left late morning to meet Wol, Ivo and Gurecki on the MRT system at various stops along the way to Taipei Main and then transfer to the high speed rail to Hsinchu. This train is an absolute phenomenon, Taiwan’s answer to the French TGV and Japan’s shinkansen. It reached 256km per hour while we were on our way to Hsinchu, and te whole trip took just 31 minutes! Apparently it tops out over 300 km/p/h on the way down to Kaohsiung. The train ride was exciting, but after a taxi ride into the main part of town, we were in for even more. I had become aware of a mixed martial arts event about a month back through a really bizarre set of degrees of separation. Long story short: ex-student on Facebook posts photo of BJJ in Taiwan- I check photo-go to website given there- MMA tournament advertised- I buy tickets! To make it even more amazing, said ex-student lives in Hong Kong and was just visiting Taipei for the weekend.
Anyway, we were stoked to get there. There was a band playing, beautiful ring girls prancing and a standard of fighter that was very high in most of the 8 bouts on the card. It was in our preferred “octagon” and followed the basic rules of the UFC which we follow closely all the time; watch all the tournaments on video etc etc. There was a large crowd in and the venue provided excellent viewing of proceedings from nearly every seat. We drank a few beers, yelled out a lot and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves! It was a long day though and we didn’t get back to the high speed rail station in time for our booked train. Luckily, the “idiotic foreigner” act I pulled worked well on the ticket girl and she replaced our tickets with no charge for the next train. (Come to think of it, the idiotic foreigner thing wasn’t really an act!) Check out all the fun right here, or you could check yet another of my blogs, FIST, for the full story.
So, late home Sunday evening and watching cricket last evening (go the Aussies) means that I’m writing this afternoon as I wait to attend the dreaded dentist. “Dr Seattle” as we call him has an extremely strange chair side manner, but I think he’s quite a good dentist. He just doesn’t like to overuse the anesthetic however: I literally leapt from the chair once when he hit a nerve and he looked quizzically at me and asked, “Can you feel that?”!
Photos from the sublime to the ridiculous: meditative nature to all out combat!