I'd organised the "Big Brother" out at Beitou to host our book nclub on Friday night. I'd scootered out during the evening one night through the week to make the arrangements, as I was doing all sorts of unusual stuff in the evening when Cass was away at camp. Apart from this booking, I'd found been out and about trying to find large photo prints, been to the hardware shop to source some hard wall hangers for pictures, eaten out at various little haunts and caught up with a couple of mates as well. The week always starts off well enough with just a hint of the single person's freedom of choice, yet by about the third or fourth day this glistening cup of possibilities has definitely started to lose its lustre! It's always great to get to Friday and know that we'll be back together again for a relaxing weekend.

Book Club was unfortunately timed of course, but it did give Cass a chance to get herself a nice long hot shower, get some washing on, and have a good relaxing lounge around with Virg'n Mary. She did just that and got to bed early for a quick acting, long lasting slumber. Cass actually found the week to be slightly more bearable than most, partly owing to the fact that we were experiencing a mini cool snap all week. Without the enervating heat and humidity, the activities proved more tolerable and less exhausting: if only the weather could cooperate like this every year!

Big brother turned out to be an inspired choice for us and we were sequestered away in a large corner section of the upstairs verandah, 3 litre beer tappers on call, nice big table for our stuff and plenty of tall tales ready to be spun! Everyone eventually drifted in, and despite the slight reluctance of some to move much beyond Tienmu, they discovered that 4 train stops up the line isn't so bad after all. The slightly more provincial feel was evident, with boisterous drinking/eating parties taking place all around us. Suffice to say, we all had a great time!

Cass and I went over to Miramar to catch the reasonable movie "The Killer Elite", which had only just come out the previous day. We went mainly to see one of our favourites, De Niro, in action but were surprised to realise that this was pretty much an Australian movie, set in exotic locales around the world. The supporting actors were nearly all Aussies and we had fun picking them out, one after another, as they made their entrances. Anyway, for what it's worth, I gave it a B and Cass a B+. We took a few photos on the way out, including a shot of the mesmerizing escalators traveling down to the ticket counter level...hypnotic! After we emerged we came home for just half an hour before going to the traditional "post camp dinner" at Wendel's Backerei. Cass selects the prime beef fillet which just melts in your mouth and we share the mushrooms cooked in butter, a smoked salmon salad and various breads for entree. Washed down with a generous glass of red, and all the deprivations of Camp Fulong are commited into a vault of bad memories from which they will not emerge till this time next year. Cass even symbolically cleansed herself by wearing all white along with her new grey and white striped jacket!

As Cass prepares herself for a very awkwardly scheduled evening, I decided to get out and do some exercise up the mountain. It was a beautiful afternoon for it and the sun, although intense and bright, was dappled through the canopy and highlighted the lushness of the forest at the moment. The steps proved to be as mean as ever and my right knee screamed and bucked in protest, but I survived to the top to enjoy the rest of the walk. Surprisingly (as it was near neither dawn nor dusk) I had a close encounter with one of my mates, the Taiwanese Macaque monkey. He was only a little one and seemd uninterested in me, but I hurried onward nonetheless....those big suckers wouldn't be too far behind! I wandered as far as the river below Yangminshan and the side of the Cultural College before turning back.

Cassy's aforementioned evening begins shortly. She is one of the representatives of the Grade 8 faculty who have been asked to attend a cocktail party at the American Club in China. These evenings are being held for each grade level's parents as a way to introduce all the new programs and happenings at school as well as allowing parents of kids at the same grade to connect more closely: suffice to say, it is work, falls on  a Sunday night and falls straight after a week away at camp....I will be attending a similar night in a couple of week's time, so I'm really looking forward to that (!)

Anyway, that's about it for the week. Photos: one at the start of book club with about half our members arrived, one in contrast at the end! Cass at the Miramar and then at Wendel's: sandwiched between is a shot of a bra shop with a weird kind of advertising inflatable outside. On my walk I encountered lots of beauty as well as a monkey and a chicken!!

Football finals continued to provide some excellent diversions this week, and with the rugby world cup and cricket in Sri Lanka added into the mix, it was "more sport, never enough", just like last week. I attended various venues on both Friday and Saturday evening in pursuit of a footy fix of one of three codes and Cass busied herself in doing a soft and slow preparation for her testing week ahead.

Cassy heads to Fulong on the north coast tomorrow with a legion of Grade 8 kids and a mismatched jumble of lieutenants to keep them fed, entertained and hopefully so exhausted by day that they'll sleep at night. It's a logistical exercise of military proportions and Cass is a leader on two of the activities. She'll once again attack the precipitous slopes of the north coast on the famous Sah Lin Trail and no doubt produce a straggling tail of whinging kids who perhaps have never done such strenuous exercise in their lives: Cass does it all again with a second group! She'll also take control of the film "shoot out", an idea she borrowed from Newcastle's own 24 hour shootout and modified to become one of the highlights of the whole camp. As usual with school camps, she'll basically be on duty 24/7 for the duration, so by the time she returns on Friday afternoon, she'll be ready for some serious relaxation.

We went down to the new Tienmu branch of Eddy's Cantina on Saturday afternoon and had a fantastic big lazy afternoon feast. This guy can really cook. We're pleased to see a young guy like Eddy make a go of it: we stumbled across his hand cart on the Damshui seaside many years ago and have tracked his progress as he made it first to a restaurant high on the hill in Danshui, and now, his second outlet in our suburb.

Today we went down to Miramar to see the atmospheric and absorbing movie, "Drive". We were attracted by many actors with supporting roles whom we admire from their TV series' work. There were actors from Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy who all did a great job. Weirdly, the main character uttered no more than 3 or 4 words for the entire first half of the film! It was different, but excellent. Cass rates it an A- and I agree.

Photos are a bit different this week. The first is of Cass posing with a tiny pig who we caught at meal time, at its little trough in a shop just round the corner. It has a tiny harness and happily wanders the footpath greeting the passersby...we're hopeful it will remain "pet worthy" and not end up on the dinner table! Others are of Eddy's, the water section at the supermarket, and a few more photos from Linda's wedding which she posted on Facebook and I gleefully downloaded to pad out my meagre photographic efforts this week!

I've succumbed to what I hope will be a relatively minor head cold this morning, so I'll be slightly briefer than usual (you'll be relieved!), as my furious two finger typing is being punctuated by sneezing and nose blowing, which slows down the process considerably! Weirdly, I was just ruminating yesterday that it was so long since I've been sick I can't remember the last time, and was congratulating myself on my robust physical health...isn't it always the way?!

Football finals fever has struck with a vengeance across two codes, and coupled with some cricket in Sri Lanka and a rugby world cup just beginning, there just wasn't enough time to watch sport this weekend. Cass has been fairly immune to this excitement for some unknown reason(!): although she did join me to watch the mighty Knights bow out of the NRL competition this afternoon to the cheatin' Storm. I've also flicked across to the Aussies in Sri Lanka doing a resurgent job, the Wallabies cleaning up the Italians in NZ and some highlights of Sam Stosur making the final at the US Open. High speed, high definition streaming internet is a beautiful and wondrous thing!

I joined a group odf dedicated AFL fans at Brandon's new apartment to watch the first and most interesting AFL final on Friday night. We had a great time and were full of praise for his new place: it's very slick and should see their Taipei longevity increase a bit as a result. The World Cup tipping crew (of whom I am the co-administrator) had a get-together at the Patio 84 (old Green Bar), but we weren't keen to see the All Blacks demolish Tonga and hear the Kiwis gloat about it, so decided instead to have a little private party before and after the AFL viewing.

Cass and I hadn't been to the new location of one of our favourite Taipei restaurants, Romano's Macaroni Grill, so we decided to have a latish, lavish lunch downtown on Saturday. The mercury had inched up a few more notches on the weekend and the heat was oppressive. We love catching the train normally, but just the getting to and from the station was almost unbearably hot, so enervating that we were on the point of collapse by the time we arrived. After a recuperative San Pellegrino and a relaxing view of the confluence of Dun Hua North Road and Min Sheng East Road from the 7th floor, we were ready for our Italian feast! Unfortunately, they had not sourced the veal this week as it was of inferior quality, but our second choices were magnificent. A highlight was our entree tasting platter...sensational calamari, bruschetta, and mushrooms stuffed with crab....yum! Not being able to face the journey back to the station, we hailed one of Taipei's ubiqutous yellow cabs and were dropped off at the Hiroka pre-school near our place to ge greeted by a very unusual sight.

The tiny boutique pre-school just round the corner from us is a Japanese language school so most of the ex-pat Japanese with tiny kiddies are customers. They were hosting their annual carnival or matsuri, but we arrived just at the right time to see very cute little girls in traditional kimono, boys in pajama style festival wear and a performance by a troop of mini Taiko drummers! They were really very skilled and we were most impressed: these drums are hard to get a decent sound from I know, as my lone experience 26 years ago was an utter disaster (for me) when a similarly aged tiny drummer took the sticks from me and produced a much healthier sound than the one I managed to make! You can check a little video of their performance above or right here.

Owing to by cold, (or massive man flu that I am currently enduring with no complaint), we haven't done a lot today. Cass made her way over to do the grocery shopping and dragged it back through the heat, side stepping a massive crew from Hakka TV filming a show in our little park on the opposite side of the river. We're going to be on the lookout for a show in the near future where a foreign woman carries red shopping bags behind the actors in a park scene!

Cass has just one more "normal" week of school before she again treks off to the north east coast with the entire 8th grade for their five days of blissful camping: you can imagine she's all aquiver in anticipation and excitement. I'm back on the last legs of my Lisbeth Salander book after being distracted by the amazing "Unbroken" while Cass is getting very little chance to make a dent in Hart's War...she's grading way too many papers these days as her student load has increased by heaps this year. Photos: a dedicated coffee machine shop (how things have changed here in Taipei), shots from and in Macaroni Grill, cute Japanese kids at their festival.

Taipei's own most famous export, the incomparable Din Tai Fung, was our destination on Saturday evening. This restaurant just never fails to excite some gushing praise from our mouths. It is so good, that we can barely tear ourselves away from our favourites: I love the chicken xiao long ba, Cassy preferring the mushroom vegetarian. The fried rice gives Mum's famous fried rice a run for its money (not quite as good though Mum!) and the spicy pickled cucumber has to be tasted to be believed. The kitchen fairies are visible as always in their show window, providing culinary skill delights for the watching public as the dough is kneaded and tossed, primped, cut and filled before being sent for a quick boil and sent steaming to tables in the signature bamboo steamers. Wow, it's making me hungry again just writing about it! We grabbed a few specialty supplies at the Sogo supermarket and scootered home to indulge our latest TV addiction of Breaking Bad....now this is a clever, original show, do yourself a favour and all that....

The surf was making an effort to appease this weekend, but we resisted the temptation to go coastal, preferring instead to brave the heat haze of the inner south west of the city. Just a few blocks west of Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall station is the National Museum of History, where a magnificent exhibition of Picasso's paintings were on show. We missed the early run of the exhibition as we were in Australia, but we were determined to see it before it moved on. As it is in its closing weeks, the crowds were pretty intense. Luckily for us, we got there around lunchtime, meaning we were able to navigate in and around the paintings and get to see all of them right up close, despite quite a press of humanity. The works covered all periods of his career and although we have visited the very museum in Paris from which all these works came, we recognized only about 1/2 of them: perhaps when we visited in France, there was another traveling show of works? It was fascinating to see the development of cubism over some decades, before a subdued approach in later years softened the edges again. Some of his early work is almost conservative, especially in contrast to what was to follow. A quirky highlight for us was seeing the bronze "cat" sculpture shining on high on a pedestal with perspex casing. I took a photo of Cass crouching by this very same cat in Paris, where it seemed it was being used as a doorstop between galleries!

When we burst from the overcrowded gift shop at the end of the line, we'd had quite enough of the crowds. To our disbelief, the line to get in now stretched for many blocks down the road: we'd got in just in the nick of time. We did get our usual fridge magnet and a couple of cards on the way out: being funneled like lemmings into kitsch filled gift shops with exorbitant prices seems de rigueur these days, a necessary evil perhaps of getting these big exhibitions into the city. It's astounding to think what was NOT in Paris over this spring and summer: the Musee Marmottan would have been little more than a dry and empty husk after being drained of the 34 Monet works on display at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in May and June while the Musee National Picasso Paris would have been similarly bereft these past few months. Ah well, we Taipei residents will soak it all up, never mind!

On the way back to the station we dropped into the distinctly more sober Taiwan 228 Memorial Museum. There was a mass slaughter of civilians on February 28th 1947 after a long period of government corruption and dictatorial decision making. It is housed in a magnificently restored Japanese era building and the displays were beautiful and respectful to the dead.

Now back home, I'm hanging on the result of the very last game of the very last round of the AFL season. I'm (ironically considering my amazing lack of knowledge of all things AFL) leading this comp, but my nearest competitor may win, depending on this very last result: it's nerve wracking! I am reading the most amazing book I've read in many years at the moment. I don't usually give book recommendations, especially on non-fiction, but this is a mesmerizing, captivating, unputdownable tale of heroism and survival. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. Photos: all in and around the museums we attended today, pretty self explanatory. Stop Press: lost the tipping comp on countback!