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!
