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!