When I was a skinny, pimply kid of 17, my mate Mark and I were pretty keen to go to the first year university students’ BBQ being staged by the students’ rep council. My older sister’s boyfriend at the time was a member and he assured us that there would be plenty of meat and beer and it would all be free. We young males, fresh from our draconian ruled all boys’ high school were also pretty keen to have a look at some girls who might be different from the poor things we’d ogled for years just because they had the misfortune to live in the same suburb and therefore catch the same bus home from school each day!

I spied this absolutely gorgeous girl talking to a guy I couldn’t stand, Harry, who had also attended the same school, but seemed to have an easy charm with the girls that we couldn’t match at all. I encouraged Mark to join me and emboldened by a couple of ales, we approached the two girls and managed to keep up quite a lively conversation for a number of hours, getting rid of Harry quite quickly and losing all track of time. I was amazed at myself but totally mesmerized by this girl…she seemed like a goddess to me: I’d never experienced such a moment. That was it pretty much for both of us we recall: it was then just about the logistics of making it all happen. That day was February 26, 1980 and it was 30 years ago!

We certainly didn’t have such a romantic dalliance this weekend, but we did have a lot of memories and amused ourselves with most of them. My bold statement to my grandmother that night, “I’ve just met the love of my life” seemed grossly overconfident of me, but very prophetic! The love of my life and I had a fairly usual weekend, but we did enjoy the weather today and went on a long walk, visiting some of our old haunts in the local vicinity that we haven’t been back to in years.

It was great to wander through the neighborhood, re-visiting parks and lanes and streets and alleys that we don’t normally travel these days. We noticed lots of changes along the way, but we highly entertained in the wet market alley in Shilin. All the excitement of Chinese New Year seemed to be over, but today must hold some special significance as burning incense fills the air, crackers are being jettisoned with increasing regularity and volume from our nearby river bridge and the omnipresent drums have been beating out their dark and mechanical rhythm through the day and evening.

The wet market’s food is always a sight, and not always a good one. The trays of colourful fish look fresh and cool lying in their ice beds, but the dripping fat of slaughtered pigs along with their misshapen heads on hooks is something we could do without! The charm of this market, however, is its coarseness: no one stands on ceremony here and if you don’t like it, you just don’t enter its murky depths! Not only is fresh meat and poultry and seafood for sale, but hawkers extol the virtues of the latest miracle oils, stallholders offer samples of cereals and honey and fried food while in between there are clothing outlets both budget and higher end, jewelry stores and hardware shops. You can pretty much get anything you want! Some temple boys provided great entertainment with their bobbing and weaving dance carrying their portable altar and the associated sounds were deafening and their entourage dirty, rough and many in number.

We eventually wandered home the long way round, crossing the bridge over the river with gardens and cycleways below and the whirring MRT in the distance. SOGO provided some takeaway sandwiches for our lunch and we settled in to watch some Twenty20 cricket in the second game between Australia and New Zealand. All in all, a great weekend, full of nostalgia and good times! Photos: market curiosities, a vista from the bridge and the curiously named “Pocari Sweat”! Cass is now reading "$20 a Gallon" and I'm reading "The Cement Garden"

 

Chinese New Year lived up to its reputation for miserable cold weather, although we both agree that it has been one of the most relaxing holidays we've ever had. The dreary conditions were just the right catalyst for guilt free sleep ins, pretty much total lack of exercise and just a little bit of excess in terms of eating and drinking!

Even though the rain and cold didn't relent for the week, until (surprise, surpise) late today, we did try to get out and about whenever we could. After my trips to the beach last Saturday and Monday, I'd pretty much given that up, so we planned to head downtown on Tuesday to check out the bright lights of Taipei East. Safely sequestered in a succession of gleaming warm trains hurtling beneath the city streets, after our underground changing and re-routing, we got a surprise when we emerged to see the rain had even intensified down here. Instead of heading further afield, we ducked into the first available building from the station, newly opened and lavish exterior suggesting something neat to spy inside.

Just as we expected, Hsin Yi's newest shopping building is even more plush and opulent than the last one. It seems that if you want customers to come in, it just has to be bigger and better! Inside, the use of space was decadent, the floor, walls, balustrades and ceiling adorned with marble, the cavernous space housing surprisingly tasteful displays of lanterns for Chinese New Year and various fountains and pools gurgling away in corners to keep the punters entertained. The usual mix of high end fashion and product boutiques were good for a window shop, but the B2 "Gourmet Food Court" was just that. We ate at "Fat Angelo's" where the wood fired pizzas looked good and our meals both made a pretty good attempt to emulate our yardstick restaurant, The Northern Star Cafe in Newcastle(they didn't make it!). The various other food outlets and speciality delis were pretty cool and one upmarket wine shop housed many bottles of Australian Petaluma and Henshkes along with the Penfolds range, which we were pretty impressed with. 

Another day we took the car out to B&Q, as I'd threatened last week. It was a targeted choice, mainly because of its underground carpark. We wandered around, bought a few supplies, bits of hardware we'd needed for a while and marvelled at all the "product". We extricated ourselves from there just at the end of my shopping breaking point, which isn't very long, and then headed to SOGO to eat some Thai food for lunch (you guessed it: also an underground carpark!). It was packed and they were turning cars away, so we kept driving all the way to Beitou where we entered the tightest underground carpark I've ever seen, straight below the Royal Host. 5 levels of underground parking rabbit warren had me fearful for the car's duco and also any mild claustrophobia we may suffer from. Luckily, we escaped unscathed, had a great relaxing mid afternoon meal before setting the GPS to find "home". Cassy seemed overly worried that I'd crash the car as I was pointing out all the remarkable (!) features on the GPS instead of keeping my eyes on the busy greasy road, but once again, we made it unharmed!

We eventually got to our Thai meal last night after I'd spent some time over at Wal's place setting him up with his new iPod and some good downloading software. Cass had been out in the afternoon too, but she had braved the Taipei bus transit system to visit her old mate, Joe the Jeweller. Joe has been working on some earrings for Cass for a while and she took delivery of them. They are to celebrate a very special milestone in our relationship which occurs next Friday, so I'll write more about that next week. All I'll say is that it involves the number 30(!)

We had a great meal and Cass pulled the lucky red envelope from a plastic case full of them and won us $500NT off our next meal there. It was the top prize and the waitress was very excited for us, so much so that we thought she might have won a prize too. Back home again today, we had Wal around for the UFC beamed live from Sydney, then a break for a couple of hours before watching the Twenty20 game between Australia and the West Indies. It's been that sort of holiday: not even tempted to set foot outside!

As karma usually has it, the weather is set to be warmer and dryer starting tomorrow for our return to work. Photos: Virg'nMary helping Cass with her school work on the laptop, various shots of the opulent interiors downtown and shots of our eating experiences! There's also an example of the Taipei peculiarity of straightforward labeling: noone is any doubt as to what this building is!

Cassy is reading the unputdownable Barry Maitland's Dark Mirror and I'm still on $20 a Gallon.

Chinese New Year holiday always brings out the very worst in Taipei’s weather conditions. We were sweltering in 30 degree heat a day before the holidays, but as soon as Saturday arrived, it reversed to type and became 12 degrees of drizzly rain and whipping, biting wind. It’s remained that way until today and is forecast to get even worse in the coming days!

I left Cass home snug in bed on Saturday and again yesterday as I searched the northeast coast for surf. Dan and I met up on both days, yesterday had the whole family with him. We got some pretty good, pretty big stormies on Saturday at Green ball, but had a futile search yesterday and just chased the waves from beach to point. It was very frustrating!

One thing that did lighten my mood a little was my fancy new GPS system, which I bought a week or so ago and hadn’t had the chance to test drive. It works really well, and even though all the names of the roads are written in Chinese, it still does the trick. It has a pretty small screen and is fairly basic, but it does everything I want it to do. Testing it out on known routes it has done an excellent job, so I’m confident when we travel farther afield it will help out.

Of course, we’ve been treated to a cacophony of firecrackers at all hours of the day and night, but we’re so used to it now that it has little effect. One thing I don’t think we’ll ever get used to is the droning constant singing that drifts across from the temple on the other side of the river. It’s hard to describe, but perhaps imagine a vinyl record slowed down to about a tenth of its original speed, lacking any kind of tune or musical merit and mix in the wailing of a cat on heat and you’ll get some idea!

Cass has cooked up a big batch of pumpkin soup which we’ve enjoyed for a few meals already and we’ve managed to get out and about during the breaks in the rain to stroll around the neighbourhood. There’s not been a lot else to do as all businesses have been closed for the last 4 days. We’re pretty confident a lot of them will start opening up again today, so we’re going to take the car out to B&Q (hardware house kinda thing) and then maybe even onwards down to the HsinYi area of 101 to get some late lunch/early dinner. We’ll see how energetic we are at the time!

We slept in till 9.30 this morning. You know how the accumulated effects of work, life etc build for a while and when you get a break it all just hits? It’s a bit like that for us this week. I’ve managed to succumb to a minor cold as well, so the dreary conditions are extra incentives to pretty much do nothing at all. We’re reading, watching movies, petting the cats, getting out for some exercise when the weather permits and pretty much doing nothing else at all…..bliss!

Photos: a very strange and very large bird we spied outside the tennis courts opposite, some Chinese new year decorations at school, the famous “pencil” Shi Dong elementary school near our house (see the size of those pencils?!), some wild Green Ball surf, a man praying in the park and the garden of our neigbour out the back. You can see we haven’t strayed too far from home this week!

 

The Twenty20 cricket match between Australia and Pakistan was the catalyst for a great together at our place on Friday afternoon/evening.  Wol, Lewy, Gurecki and Dave Millard all attended along with me and Cass of course and we had a rollicking good time. I got a stack of pizzas from a new and very bargainous pizza joint nearby (Mayan Pizza) and we feasted on them and various other snacks and beverages as well as a few refreshments. I made a conscious decision not to have any beers because I was very keen on doing a dawn patrol out on the coast to try to catch some swell. The game was frenetic and entertaining and Dave is slowly warming to the charms of cricket after a life-long affair with his national Canadian ice hockey. Gurecki had to leave about 2/3 of the way through to deal with his garbage (the quirky system we have as explained on these pages quite recently) and the others made it to the end.

Saturday found me driving out to the northern coast alone very early, with Cass still home snug in bed. Dan was meant to be joining me, but his wife Nicky was pretty sick so he had to stay home to look after the kids. I was really surprised to find I was the only surfer around and eventually spotted a pretty good wave rolling in off Jinshan Point. I haven’t surfed Jinshan for a long time: unlike the good old days of eight, nine years ago, the beach is far from deserted normally, with every would-be surfer and their entourage making a bee line straight for this iconic northern break. Saturday was a different story however. It was a little spooky paddling out through the harbor, punching through the main break and sitting on the point all alone in the early morning mist. Sharks?  Other perils? What is going on? I enjoyed the consistent glassy four footers for a couple of hours, and then paddled in, still all alone. I finally figured out the possible reasons. It is Chinese New Year next week and everyone is furiously preparing their houses for an influx of visitors and also all weather reports indicated a very strong wind for the morning session. There was hardly a breath, in fact, what there was turned offshore and cleaned up the waves. Anyway, apart from the spookiness factor, I was well pleased!

We had a nice lazy Sunday, our usual late and long breakfast accompanied by selected clippings from The Herald which Mum continues to send religiously….thanks Mum! We then began to watch the one day cricket before I decided to watch UFC 109. Quite magically that seemed to spur cassy on to do something different, so she got ready and then wandered over to Mingde Rd to do some shopping! When she arrived back it was time to once again watch some cricket which we did in the afternoon. At about 5 o’clock I took off for the train station, destination Luxy nightclub, the flash and the hip of Taipei’s Dunhua district. Was I losing it? Clubbing on a school night? Mid-life crisis? No, in a very clever piece of marketing to fill their otherwise pretty empty club on a Sunday night, they were the venue for  “Destiny v Demons” a mixed martial arts extravaganza, much like the UFC, but a definite step down in class. By the time I got there I’d talked to Dave on the phone while on the train (Dave Ivo) who couldn’t make it and Wol, who could, and would meet me outside Xhongxiao Dunhua station for the short walk to the venue.

It was a crazy scene all night. There fighters of some accomplishment being mis-matched against guys that looked like they’d just walked off the street. Wol and I were convincing each other that we could have taken care of a couple of them (a wild exaggeration, no doubt!). As the program moved on through the night, we saw some very skilful action and some great fights. The in between fight action was entertaining and bizarre. The Luxy dancers were trying their best to look sexy, but even though very cute, appeared more like 14 year old girls playing grown up. The ring girls had spectacularly obvious fake boobs, the Taiko drummers were solid, but the entertainment of the night came from the famous Taiwanese “Face Change”. This incredible guy danced around in a cape to some traditional music and at regular intervals would change his face mask, seemingly at will. It was a dazzling display of sleight of hand, and nearly elicited the applause of the night! There was a strange mix of people there too: dedicated fight fans, both foreign and Taiwanese, obnoxious foreigners who proceeded to give all of us a bad name by yelling out all sorts of inappropriate rubbish, and the general Taiwanese curious, who must have gone away scratching their heads at this strange new brutal but completely mesmerizing sport. Anyway, suffice to say it was a long night and I wasn’t exiting the MRT station at Mingde until nearly 11 o’clock. Another terrific, but certainly off beat Taiwan experience!

I’ll include a few great shots of last night’s action as well as the deserted Jinshan Point. Virg ‘n Mary have also recently commandeered “Mike’s Chair” so there’s a shot of them on that as well. Cass is reading The Abstinence Teacher and I'm reading $20 a Gallon.I've also just published another article with my writing partner, the great Gurecki, called The Power of Reading Transcends the Trends. You can read it here if you need a sleeping pill!

The Yangminshan national park really is an incredible natural asset for us to have so close to us, the lower reaches nestling in just above section six of the main north south road, just a 5 minute scooter ride from our place. Within minutes of entering the lower reaches of the paths and trails, you can feel worlds away from the hustle and bustle of Taipei, and the perfect weekend weather was a great opportunity to get out amongst it.

I did just that, despite nursing a bit of an injury, and it was terrific to get out in the sublime conditions amongst the greenery and beside the rushing streams. I find myself drifting off a little walking these trails: it’s a good thing, because sometimes I snap out of my revelry and realize I’m nearly at the end of a section and have somehow solved a few minor problems without even giving them too much thought. I also have a rather strange habit of replaying Chinese phrases in my head and sometimes (not always!) have a little better understanding or memory of them at the end of the walk.

Cass took the opportunity to have a little sleep in on the weekend after a big week preparing for and then hosting her book club at our place on Friday night. It was a great success, even though I think she’s getting a little sick of cooking a pavlova every time they come. Some of the other members love it so much they just insist that it be on the menu! She cooked them some Tex-Mex bean entrée kinda thingy (no doubt this is a very strange description of the dish for which I’ll be chastised) and the old faithful “Salmon muck” (same!), also known as Salmon Mornay, which is one of our all time favourites. The “girls” didn’t eat it all, so I’ve been the beneficiary of some very tasty leftovers this weekend..yeh!

I’ve suffered a flare up of an old injury I had back in the triathlon days unfortunately. My regular aerobic regime of either climbing stairs, or replicating this climbing on a seriously inclined treadmill was going extremely well until I recently started feeling an odd pain in my right knee. It seemed vaguely familiar, but I knew it wasn’t a medial ligament problem (which I had surgery to alleviate some years ago) so dismissed it as just a training ache. Soon enough I realized why it was so familiar: it was the old overuse injury of the iliotibial band stretched down my right leg over the outside of the kneecap. I’d stupidly stopped wearing the orthotics that had corrected the problem originally, as I was “just walking” and not doing the crazy distances I used to pound out on hard surfaces. I was so stupid! I’ve had to start using the orthotics again, and I’m slowly building up strength ….I just hope I haven’t worn it away too far! Anyway, I’m getting the idea that I have to just be a touch more careful in my training as a person of advancing years!

As Chinese New Year rapidly approaches, our thoughts have turned to how to get rid of a stealthily rising amount of “stuff”. In years gone by, residents would just start dumping all manner of unwanted furniture, appliances etc etc on street corners where city workers would come along in trucks to collect it. The trouble was that other people would join the party until the piles of rubbish would start encroaching on the road and inhibit traffic flow! In order to stop this, individuals can now telephone to have stuff picked up. We have arranged for a truck to come tomorrow morning, so we’ll leave the stuff out tonight. We have old computer monitors, keyboards, fans, a clothes dryer, an old TV and DVD player etc etc. This was a little confronting for us as we realized that all this stuff was bought brand new when we arrived and it has gradually either broken down or become obsolete…how long have we been here now?! Anyway, we’re looking forward to a good old “spring clean”.

We’ve just got this week and next before we get a week off for Chinese New Year, and that will be welcome. Photos: (I’ll post this evening) are all of little spots along the trails of lower Yangminshan.