You can see little Virgy is still able to relax in the heat! Her guts always seem to expand a fair bit over the big break here, and we suspect there's not a lot of exercise going on, just lots of eating and sleeping. I do understand, however, her reluctance to do anything more strenuous, as we ourselves have been loathe to drag ourselves away from the cool sanctuary of our apartment as this brutal heat spike goes on and on.

I went to book club after a few beers with Gurecki and Wal on Friday night, but wisely made an exit before the vodka shots started going down! Stupidly though, I left a bag of 2 books on the ground just outside our place and by the time I realised where I'd left them, the recycling lady had come along and snaffled them...I'll have a bit of explaining to do next time. Saturday was a very low key day for both of us, although I did set up a wireless internet router in the house. Set up sounds rather technical, where all I really did was plug in all the cords the right way, put in the set up CD and away we went. The password didn't work at first until we realised we had to key in the other "encryption key" which was a bit weird. Anyway, all's well that ends well and it was tested on Cassy's laptop out in the lounge room and on my iPod all over the apartment. We have a warp speed connection these days, and the 3 appliances running off it at once didn't seem to affect it one bit.

"Inglorious Basterds" was the pick of the flicks on Sunday so I booked some tickets online in our favourite seats, then went to pick them up on my way to the 1000 steps. Tickets duly collected, I soldiered on. It was crazy up there yesterday! There were families trying to drag up/ cajole/bribe little kiddies all the way, old people, young people, fat and skinny, sweet and smelly and the whole gamut in between. How many mental defectives could possibly want to pit themselves against these monsters in the 36 degree midday sun? Plenty! I gave up trying to post a decent time, satisfied myself with making it up and back and getting cooled down and showered before motoring off to the cinema. The picture was spot on, a Tarantino classic hit with all the hallmarks of previous films, but with more emphasis on taut tension and clever dialogue than ever before. The violence was even more graphic and horrifying, but mercifully short each time allowing a hand up to shield the eyes and a healthy "la, li, la" to dull the hearing a good antidote! Brad Pitt was a revelation: as we've known for quite some time, this guy is far more than a pretty face. You know those films that keep coming back to you the next day? Real, quality, memorable films? This is one of those for sure.

The newly opened Papa Poulet was our destination for a takeaway chicken and proprietor Chris was chuffed that so many people had visited in the past week. I scanned one of his fliers and sent it around the staff at school, knowing they would appreciate his sensational rotisserie chooks just as much as we did. The other more selfish reason is that we want the guy to stay in business...!

I've taken the car down to our mechanic today and gone through my usual spazzy set of Chinese phrases to try and get a few things done. One of the reasons we haven't ventured out for weeks is, apart from the heat, the fact that the car air conditioner couldn't cope with it. It's doing little more than fanning warm air around. Anyway, without any English, I've communicated my belief that the air con is busted or leaking, the fact that I want new spark plugs and a change of not only the oil, but also the oil filter. I hope I said this OK, because the guy seemed fascinated that I would want an oil change, going over the costings with me: don't people change their oil here?

Somewhat ironically, considering these limited successes on the language front, I've decided to cut back my Chinese lessons to once a week (hence the time to write this now after my slackness yesterday!). I must be getting too old for this language learning caper as stuff just doesn't stick like it used to, so I'm just going into maintenance mode. I reckon I know enough to get us out of trouble (or into it!) so that will do for now. Another irony is that I might even just do a little more independent study without the pressure of a lesson every few days.

Photos: Virg relaxing in style, getting a Papa chicken down near the Shi Dong market. Cassy is reading Unaccustomed Earth and David is reading A Day at the Races by Matt Dray.

Unless we’re turning into complete wimps, the temperatures in Taipei this week have been almost insufferable. We’ve just crept from one indoor air conditioned haunt to another, from home to work and back home again, from home to shop and back. The time spent in the outdoors means being exposed to 40 degree heat with an associated wet thick blanket of humidity. It’s enervating, annoying and soul destroying: anyway, you get the idea!

During the week I haven’t even ventured outdoors to do the steps, but rather relied on a pretty good indoor substitute. The vaguely air conditioned and fanned weight room at school has a couple of good treadmills where I set the incline to maximum, set a good slow jog speed and then stay on there for 20 minutes or so. I’m saturated and huffing and puffing at the end, so I think it does the trick. A bit of speedball, heavy bag and a few weights and I feel justified in crawling back to the air-conditioning! I’ll start up my Chinese lessons again this week, as quite fortuitously, my teacher has been in the States. I really wasn’t ready to commit again this week, so this little bit of extra “ease in” time has been welcome.

Cass didn’t have any extra duties this weekend, so she’s been happy to potter around at home. We did bite the bullet and expose ourselves to the midday heat today when we went downtown, just to avoid going stir crazy. We planned on getting to the south East and checking out the action, including stopping at Pie Boy for lunch and to get a few takeaway supplies. We’d found it previously on my “find a pie in Taipei” mission a few months back. Anyway, much to our great disappointment, it has closed down! In its place was a little burger joint which was also closed, not a good sign at all. We’re just hoping that he has re-located somewhere and that we’ll re-discover him somewhere else soon. After that, we traced our steps back to the station, dropped again into the bowels of the earth and traveled another stop underground to visit Tex Mex spot, “Yuma”. We had a tasty meal, but it was huge. I wondered whether we were getting old and having small appetites or perhaps we were turning American and leaving half the food on our plates? I decided the alternative was too horrific to contemplate and settled for being old!!

Designer jeans at more than 70% off on the way back saw us get a pair each. I got some for $40, but we then realized we could get a second pair for just $20 more, so Cass got a pair as well. A pair of thongs for $4 (translation: flip-flops U.S. jandals N.Z.) completed the bargains.

We always pass by a quite amazing sight on the way back home as we change trains at Taipei Main Station. On the way to the Danshui line, there is a display advertising the exquisite items available for viewing at the Grand Palace Museum. It is just a little taster of what is available, but never ceases to amaze us: there are treasures from the Ming Dynasty and earlier, all behind a very fragile looking glass barrier in the city’s main train station! Quite amazing: I imagine if this was back home it would last a few days at best.

The heat has certainly brought out the best and the worst of Taipei fashion too. On some people, baring lots of flesh is a very good summer look indeed, but others who should cover up a little for all sorts of reasons are flaunting acres of flesh in the strangest outfits you’ll ever see. I suppose you just have to take the bad with the good.

Cass and I have been watching the Ashes cricket here each night and becoming increasingly morose as the Australians hopes of winning look more and more remote. I watched a couple of sessions with Wol and Shaun, the Craw and Lewy at the Green Bar on Friday, after they arrived back from the Board party. Both Cass and I forsook the charms of the night this year, and apparently it was a good decision as it was a bit of a fizzer. The weather map shows little relief for the coming week, so we’ll just have to grin and bear it. Photos: Cass posing in front of antique treasures at Taipei station, and a few more shots of our time back home, as we only took the one photo this week!

Typhoon Morakot cut a devastating swathe through the middle and especially the southern mountain villages of Taiwan. Its ferocity was such that, unusually, it actually made news in Australia, prompting concerned calls and emails from family and friends. We were relatively untouched up here in the north, the high winds and driving rains just providing inconvenience rather than distress. Our school pulled together an amazingly quick relief support effort, the results of which can be read about here. It’s strange being back in a country with lots of minor and sometimes major natural interventions: our paintings and photos were all at odd angles on the wall when we got back indicating at least one pretty decent earthquake in our absence.

The cloying heat of the past weeks has been compounded by a lack of wind and cloud cover and a watch settingly accurate tropical downpour at 3.55 every afternoon: It doesn’t last the same amount of time always, but it always starts then! Cass and I somehow forgot that this afternoon when we dilly dallied just a touch too long down at Carrefour and got caught. It was a fairly boring little shopping run, but we checked out the whole store to check out their latest and greatest. With a succession of high end stores opening up locally in recent months, everyone has had to lift their game to attract customers. Carrefour certainly had a few surprises and Cass was delighted to get a few more French style things than we’ve been used to.

Cassy had to go into work officially this morning to do her second half day extra. She’s not too worried as she gets paid and they ended up getting lots done which wouldn’t have been possible in the helter skelter of a normal day in the first full week back. She and I have both met our kids and can report that they’re as delightful as usual, with the odd quirky one just to make life interesting! I have added two classes to my load this year as the K-12 role I’ve done for years has evaporated. I’m kind of excited actually, as one of the classes is a support class where I’ll have my big group of kids in my own class and most importantly, under my rules for the first time in 8 years! It’s hard being a support teacher, team teacher etc all the time as you never get to put that individual stamp on classroom management etc…should be great.

Cass is tasked with getting all her kiddies working almost exclusively on their laptops as the school rolls out the next phase of the “1 to 1” strategy. She will be using nearly all digital tools during her lessons, and the assignments and exercises and activities will be virtually paperless. It’s a big challenge for the kids, but perhaps an even bigger challenge for the teachers…let’s face it; the kids are real digital natives. So Cass is on a fast learning curve to be the ringmaster in a technologically advanced circus and will be using her laptop and theirs, the data projector, the net and other tools to teach her content from now one….a big challenge!

While she was in at school, I braced myself to hit the 1000 steps again. My first effort back last week was very poor, but at least today I managed to beat that time by 40 seconds, even with Sunday stair traffic and a beastly heat. It’s just so beautiful and peaceful up there: we’re really lucky to have this national park right on our doorstep.

Last night we went up to Thai Town and had a great meal (as usual there) and wandered around in Shinkong Mitsukoshi soaking up the Saturday night vibe for a while. We discovered that the 2nd floor of one of the buildings has been turned over exclusively to a food court: don’t tell me we have even more restaurants to check out (!). We had a great weekend and are steeling ourselves to handle a full week with kids this week…we’re anticipating that, like the weather, it will be fairly enervating!! Photos: at Thai Town and some shots on the steps. Cass is reading "Night"

Maybe it is the slowly retreating typhoon we’ve experienced over the past few days, but more likely, our slightly deflated mood is due to the rapid onset of that necessary evil, work. Our week back has been very relaxed, and while we’ve been officially at work this week, the workload has been light and we’ll experience the full force of hundreds of bright happy people when we walk through the gates tomorrow! Because the typhoon closing the campus on Friday, Cass has had to do a half day’s work at school today, much to her horror!

What an unreal holiday we had again this year. We both think it was one of the best we’ve ever had. A flying visit to HK for Coombsy’s wedding was a special way to start and our unit was all fixed up and felt very luxurious due to a few improvements that took place through the year and during the break. We had a magic trip to New Zealand to see Ross and Ains followed almost immediately by a cleansing yet very eventful week away on the Harley. The surf at Merewether was consistently powerful and fun and the clean blue water matched the sunny skies most days as well. We got to see our families and friends as well and feasted on lots of fine foods and wines. It’s always great to get back home and see little Virg’n Mary who were equally excited to see us and to get ensconced again in our funny little island in the East China Sea, but Australia was hard to leave.

Our unit was spotlessly cleaned by Chris and Val in preparation for our arrival and we sank into the sumptuous new carpet and enjoyed the “real” look of the place compared to the previous leaky walls and bare cement paint splattered floor in places. The shutters out the back added an extra touch of class and we just turned appliances on and away we went. The extra special present we gave to ourselves was our super thin wireless Sony TV to hang on the wall, purchased so we could re-configure the lounges to take even more advantage of the view. Our unit really felt like a home when we put the new table back on the deck with the BBQ…we just needed to sit back and enjoy it all, and we did that very successfully!

Our tradition of seeing Ross and Ains once a year saw us travelling to NZ for a week. From the moment they picked us up at Dunedin airport to taking us back there a week later, we had a wonderful time. We enjoyed seeing them in their house, which is just beautiful and felt right at home with all the fine Chinese antiques. We did a few little touristy things but mainly enjoyed having a chat about all things under the sun, usually over a bottle or three of top shelf local wine! Ross and I went surfing at Smail’s beach as I was keen to experience the arctic conditions he needs to endure to get a surf…it was pretty intense!! Our trip to their holiday house in Queenstown was fantastic too and we enjoyed the “extreme” ambiance along with really getting a feel for their lives. It was great to see them and we’re already tentatively planning where to meet up next year.

Firing up the Harley to go on our annual trip was thwarted by a flat battery at first, where I was rescued by Chris and Val bringing the caravan battery down to charge it! We spent the night in Port Macquarie satisfied that we’d fully charged battery on the way up but alas, it was dead again the next day. Friendly guys from Port Macquarie motorcycles rescued us then and replaced the battery. After that drama, we really enjoyed a succession of days doing exciting rides through the hinterland of the mid north coast and enjoyed some tasty lunches at chic country restaurants before heading back to our hotel base. We enjoyed visiting sleepy little towns and villages and taking every “tourist route” we could spot…it was just so blissful to purr down picturesque country roads under sunny skies before chugging up winding mountain roads and visiting little art galleries, cafes, lookouts all along the way. The battery problem reappeared necessitating a clutch start after lunch on our way home and the subsequent repairs discovered a number of other things going wrong. All fixed up, the bike was then washed to a sparkling clean and ridden up to the bay to be garaged ready for next year.

We had a great chance to catch up with nearly all the family when we hosted a BBQ after we got back from the bike trip. Cass cooked some unreal desserts of crème caramels and a very popular Pavlova! It was a little surreal to see how sophisticated and grown up our nieces Ellen and Lily were and Michael and Lucy were equally “grown” as was even little Duncan. It was a treat to see the kids and catch up with my sisters and Mum especially as we always seem to be elsewhere for the other big family gathering at Christmas in recent years. We had lots of meals out with Chris and Val and Mum along with a last visit to the Northern Star with Jen, Vince and the girls just before we came back.

We had various get-togethers with different groups of friends over the 2 months, as well as some more regular contacts with some, especially Thurza and Mark, as they were both often enjoying the charms of the beach! Photos: just a sample of some of our adventures, I hope they’re fairly self explanatory. I'm reading "Bad Money" and Cass has gone back to the" ...Kelly Gang"