Well this was the weekend that the Typhoon Nanmado threatened and teased, wildly whipped wind and rain around at certain points, yet failed to deliver any knockout blow. While we wait with baited breath for its full onslaught in the next couple of days, our colleagues are huddled indoors awaiting that most pleasant of phone calls, the "school is cancelled due to typhoon arrival" one. Unfortunately for all of us, I have strong doubts whether the call will eventuate this time as the typhoon is a slow moving monster, not making landfall till tomorrow morning and just providing lashings of very annoying wind and buckets of rain.

Saturday saw us trip to the coast to try to milk the surf that should be compressed into action from all this swirling wind and water: it didn't eventuate! We drove and checked all the spots on the north coastal tip till we settled on the cliffs just outside Jinshan town. Cass positioned herself on the top of the cliff, coolie's straw pointy hat adorning her as she sat on her favourite perch to enjoy the spectacular view of sun and sea. I got a few waves, nothing spectacular and by the time I got out it wasn't even quite time for lunch. Nonetheless, we decided to grace the most impressive Jinshan restaurant, "Victoria" for lunch on our way back through. It is 4 star dining, of 3 courses and coffee, all for the princely sum of just $30 Australian (that's for both of us)....incredible! Satiated for food and nature's beauty we meandered our way back through the mountain road's endless curves to home where we watched the Knights capitulate yet again and then the Wallabies triumph over the All Blacks in the Tri-nation's final: good fun! (well the Wallabies part at least!)

Today, I ventured to the coast by myself, as Cass had lots of other stuff to get done. It was very frustrating! Again the swell did not eventuate and indeed, every spot from the Pillbox near Damshui all the way through to Baishawan was totally flat. The spots through to the Rocket were messy and blown, but the Rocket provided me and Dan (who I eventually met up with) some OK little fun waves. I was exhausted when I got home because of all the driving, and was ravenously hungry. My darling wife cooked up a huge plate of curried chicken for us and I ate that with relish just a few minutes ago!

Typhoons give an unusual gift just before they torment us with their real content. The days before a strike are resplendent in clear as glass blue skies, puffy white clouds and just a whisper of wind. They can suck all the polluted haze right off the city for a little while at least. We took this panorama shot of the Taipei basin on Saturday afternoon: it's a rare gem to see the city so clearly delineated. It spreads beyond this picture, but this gives an idea of the "city in a bowl". Other photos are of Cassy's favourite house on Yangminshan, totally made of granite, a few shots from the coast including kayakers in the river and some surfers learning their craft. Yet others show the interior and food of "Victoria", and a recently balded fellow inspecting his board! STOP PRESS: we just got the call: no school tomorrow, the typhoon is lumbering shoreward.

The annual board of director's party was the social highlight on Friday night but neither Cass nor I were in attendance due to various other commitments.Cassy enjoyed a coffee and catch-up with her friend Kristin, with whom she now does not work on a daily basis. They shared holiday stories and how they're both coping (or otherwise!) with their new ramped up and extended workload.

I met a troop of guys down at the Green Bar (Patio 84 in its new incarnation) where we watched the AFL game between Carlton and Hawthorn. Shaun was needing to fulfill some official duties at the party so he raced out to do that at some point. The rest of us seemed to barely blink and a whole load of other teachers materialised from the heat haze to party further. This went on and on till all hours. It's always a great chance to catch up with colleagues who we rarely see for the rest of the year, but it also proves, invariably, to be a late and rollicking night!

On Saturday, we strolled at a leisurely pace down to the "Eat Burger" restaurant, which is still doing quite a roaring trade with their unusual blend of American diner style fare. Our Din Tai Fung dumpling cravings having been satiated last week along with our Italian pizza ones, we thought it was about time for this one to be treated as well. It was  extremely tasty and the high school kids who we saw at a long table, instead of being horrified at the presence of teachers in their haunt, were polite and friendly as we left.....these kids are genuinely "nice"!

I went and got my hair cut down at Bessy's place today ("razored off" is probably a more accurate description of this no comb, steel blades only buzz cut!) and then Cass went and did the shopping. She was close to passing out when she returned: the combination of some heavy shopping items and the hyper sapping heat was not a pleasant one. We recovered by watching the movie "Bad Teacher". This was a bizarre experience: while the temple across the river hosted the most mournful tuneless and very loud karaoke singing of all time, we needed to close the door to drown it out. At the same time, we watched this very American, very silly movie...it was hilarious! I think you really need to be a teacher to appreciate it as it turns a c grade flick into a pretty funny romp as we laughed at all the "types" we could identify amongst colleagues past and present and a bit of ourselves in there too!

I had to go back to Papa Poulet this afternoon as he didn't have our ordered rotisserie chicken ready. I came back and fiddled with the photos on here before setting out again. Photos are a little quirky. I snapped Cass with my phone on the way back from work midweek posing with one of the automated "workers" at a road works. Another is of the girls luxuriating in their room on a shelf and in a basket, even in 35 degree heat....they're quite mad! Cass has quite taken to eating the "Man salad" from 7/11 (the "Women salad" is yucky apparently) and the garbage workers and the cops were out on Saturday night, the cops intimidating with their 125 cc motor scooters (!) and the garbage guys waiting for people to "bring out their dead"! I've also included a few shots of my new intake of kids: as always, cute and delightful!
I've now graduated to the 3rd and final installment of the Millennium series which is engrossing, and Cass is still reading Harts War.

Cass had a stint down at the Polish Nation Intellectual Forum on Friday and brought some much needed intelligence and glamour to the event. The Forum (also known as a few beers at our Friday evening haunt, Uli's) was pleased to have her input and even though she insisted on staying for only one beer, more sense came from that half an hour than all the rest put together. The usual suspects of Wol and Gurecki were in attendance, and although John and Dave had threatened to attend, they left it for next time.

Saturday was a blanket of blistering heat. The sun was cutting like a hot knife through butter as it hit the skin as evidenced by our house guest's painfully rosy red sunburn when he arrived in the mid-afternoon after a morning at the beach. Andrew is a Kiwi Warrior's fan and a young teacher at school. He and his wife (who also works at school) have a young baby and I think he was keen to duck away from the parenting just for an hour or two! The Knights played the Warriors on Saturday, so we all enjoyed watching the game together: luckily he had to leave a while before the end when the Knights were still in front. They subsequently capitulated all too easily so we were spared a bit of a ribbing!

Pizzeria Oggi was our destination foe an early meal out on Saturday evening. It is a very authentic slice of Italian cuisine, decadently for us just a stroll round the corner...we don't even need to employ the scooter to get there. Fresh salad and San Pellegrino water to wash down the thin wood fired oven pizza was just the shot. On the way home, we got the bread load for the week from Wendel's, Cass cashed in her "loyalty card" for a present of a bottle of German grape juice, and we got some blank DVDs and batteries at the electrical shop. This whole village living in the overall big city is fantastic. We could barely think of a service or product we couldn't get from our place just within a two or three block radius...spoilt.

School has been rather confronting this week. Three big days of endless meetings and planning were followed by two even bigger days of all the classes and all the kids. We often comment that schools would run so much more efficiently without all those pesky students! Suffice to say, we were pretty shell-shocked, which led us to crack one of our superb bottles of Henschke's we'd been saving for just such an emergency. Its super smooth flavour and great complexity had us swooning instead of stressing over a couple of nights early on: thanks Chris and Val! 

Escaping the heat in the air-conditioned comfort of the Miramar cinema was the order of the afternoon today. It's weird how different our Australian and Taiwanese lives are: we commented today that we eat completely different foods, fill up our days with completely different tasks (like work here!)and have wildly different leisure activities. We didn't get to the cinema once while we were back home this time. "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes" was a pretty solid affair: I was expecting to be disappointed as I don't think modern versions could possibly have the same impact as the original classics, but all concerned did a fine job and the CGI apes were something to behold....good fun!

In August, "Ghost Month" there are a lot of superstitions here, including not swimming in the ocean....I wish someone would remind all the local surfers of that! There are lots of tables sitting on footpaths covered with luscious foods and drinks, incense sticks jutting from pieces of fruit smouldering away and filling the streets with beautiful bouquets. Paper money is thrown into mini fire bins with gay abandon: It obviously doesn't matter to the gods that the money is not real! The fiery metal baskets blaze away in the already stifling atmosphere and blast the passer-by with a wave of heat at regular intervals.

Photos today feature two of these scenes, Cass outside the dumpling shop on the corner, Virg relaxing cross legged and the sweet elixir of fine Australian Shiraz. I've graduated to the second Stieg Larsson on my e-reader, "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and Cass is reading "Hart's War" by John Katzenbach, as it ties into the themes she is teaching this year. See ya!

 

 

You know how lately all TV shows tend to start with “previously on…..” then the voiceover launches into a review of the previous show? I feel a lot like that here today in front of the computer, but nothing comes to mind at all. Haven’t I just experienced one of the greatest breaks we’ve had in 10 years overseas? Didn’t both Cass and I agree that this trip back home easily topped the others for a multitude of reasons? Perhaps, at long last, I’ll be able to hang up my keyboard and two finger tap out an easier, more relaxed kind of update by email, not worrying about meeting my Sunday night deadline and not obsessing about updating the excruciating minutia of our lives.

Who am I kidding….here’s the long winded version of our holiday coming up, in true wordy, overblown form, gratuitous verbiage and overly drawn out description and detail included!

It really did become the joy of the holiday to go on our daily walk from our place along the Bather’s Way, all the way up to King Edward Park and the tiny grotto of the convict hewn Bogey Hole, at times glistening and calm and at others furiously powerful with wind and swell. It’s only 6 km, but a few testing hills made it a workout if we stepped out a bit. It was on this walk that we re-connected with our hometown. Whales puffing in the distance, dolphin pods of 100s bending their steely banana bodies in unison in the water just beyond the break. The lone, plodding swimmer in the mirror like pond of ocean with a stiff westerly holding down the swell. The other walkers cheerily greeting us on the way, and the skaters dropping precipitously, exhilaratingly into the bowl at the skatepark or clacking around on top. Back home was just as good as hangliders desperately searched for a puff of wind to sustain altitude, seemingly almost careering into our dining room as they looped and swirled in front of our windows. The cup of tea while we watched the “reverse sunset” was always a treat, impossible colours mixing in the evening clouds, changing minute by minute. We’d sometimes sit and watch well after nightfall, and then be shaken from our contemplation as we questioned where the light went!

We headed out on the Harley for a week of blissful riding, the hum of the engine at cruising speed a natural relaxant. Each kilometre out on the open road we travelled, the more we again felt that strange pull of being in a faraway world, where time seems to slow down and troubles just melt away. Having left a little later than usual, there wasn’t much to melt as we’d already had our fair share of relaxation! Just absorbing the countryside, the sights and especially the smells of the land as our thunderous beast whips through the outback landscape is an amazing cathartic exercise. You can clear your head to the point where speech becomes redundant, which we often found when we’d stop for a break. We were pretty content to just continue our own thoughts of the ride, just have a few words and enjoy a coffee or a meal before saddling up for the next leg of the journey.

As can be seen from the photos above, which give just a tiny smattering of our social interactions, we managed to make some time to meet up with friends and family as well. Always a slightly difficult task as no one else seems to be leading our particular life of leisure at this time of year; we nonetheless managed to have some fine catch-ups in between all the other commitments of people’s daily lives. Restaurant meals, meals at homes, nights out, coffee afternoons etc etc, all gave us a chance to touch base again with the people we miss the most while we’re over here.

Our Tasmanian friends, Lewy and Alison, currently working in Singapore but previously with us in Taipei, paid us a visit for a few days and it was fantastic to see them, play host and show them around a little bit of our fine city. We were due to fly to New Zealand to visit Ross and Ains, but after getting down to the airport, we found out in the queue that all flights were cancelled! Biggest snow dump in years meant flights were impossible for days, so we pulled the plug and went back home. I had a good catch up on the phone with Ross that night, we got credit for our tickets, so we’ll try again next year! As it turned out, the small silver lining on this snow cloud was that the weather really turned it up a notch for that last week. It was like a mild summer: crystal clear days, warm temps and water just bracing enough to shock but not to repel: I spent a few great sessions surfing and even body surfing just in boardshorts!!

We reckon the proof of a good holiday is how relaxed and content you feel at the end of it, along with how positive you feel about being ready to face the grind of daily work again. Even though we’re a little trepidatious as the TAS juggernaut looms large for a start tomorrow morning, we were so relaxed at the end of our holiday; we had a hard time staying awake! The prospect of another ten months in Taiwan before being back on the shores of bonny Newcastle was not daunting either: we’ll work hard, play kinda hard and miss all our people and places back home, but know that another magical break will be upon us before we know it. 

Here is a link to the slideshow, from which I pulled most of the photos above. I just snapped the last shot when we shopped the day after we got back to Taipei. Reckon you'd see anyone wearing this gear in the supermarket back home?!