On Saturday night, we decided to go to a restaurant downtown that we haven’t tried but has very good reviews. Unfortunately, we were too late to book for a busy Saturday. Instead we managed to book in to Tienmu’s own fine dining establishment, Le Jardin, which we visited relatively recently for the Craw’s wedding party. It has moved from its old Chung Chen location and is now hidden away in the ground floor of an apartment building just off section 7. They have spared no expense on the décor and the general ambiance is one of luxuriant calm. It is a beautiful space with wood paneling, soft music and trickling water in pots scattered in the outdoor courtyard. We were even entertained by a tiny kitten while we waited for our first course. It played then slept, found its mother, suckled, nuzzled then cavorted some more. The food was just delectable: we both ended up having the exact same thing with a slab of salmon followed by chicken consommé. Then came the beef medallion and the most decadently rich chocolate cake/pudding you could imagine. All courses were artistically plated up (isn’t that what you’re supposed to say now in the Masterchef age?!) and served on fine china with sparkling cutlery.
Out to the beach today and though the sun had dipped behind a few clouds this morning to lower the temperature, it was always a false dawn of hope for cooler weather. However as we climbed up the back slopes of Yangminshan a not uncommon sight greeted us. Just in sight of the belching fumaroles an almost saturnine drape of cloud and drizzle slowly falls on the landscape. Cars slow down to a crawl as if we’ve entered an alien landscape and the pall of mist and rain follows us all the way down to the Jinshan plain. Once there though, the rain lifted, the sun again sat behind a cloud and we enjoyed a few hours of very pleasant temperatures.
Cass has nominated “Jinshan number 2” as her favourite beach. It has a cliff top panoramic viewing point with some conveniently placed boulders for sitting and viewing. She took her latest Australian House and Garden magazine, armed herself with the camera and warned me she’d just take a few early on before settling into her reading material. I had a great time out in the water. It was a luke warm bath and hardly refreshing, but the surf was powerfully churning up a wafer thin bank and providing some fast hollow little waves if you dared. All my surf gear was loaded down with sand by the time I got out, and although a bit exhausting it was lots of fun. Cass got us some refreshments from the nearest convenience store and was stoked to find a “zero” version of Sarsaparilla. The weirdest thing here is that the only low cal soft drink available is Diet Coke (up till now at least). I suppose the local default body doesn’t really worry about sugared soft drinks: Taiwanese people are envy producing svelte!
Great trip home again, but a bit funny as I’d forgotten to bring some dry shorts. I drove home in my undies, asked Cass to throw some shorts off the balcony, which I subsequently retrieved, donned, then drove up to school to garage the car and scooter home! I l left the camera at school this weekend, so what we have above is from Cassy’s school file (her team pic this year) and some she took with our old camera today at the beach. I’m being very slow on my Connelly, but Cass has moved on to The Elegance of the Hedgehog which she reports as alternating philosophical viewpoints from characters…translated from the French.
