So much to do, so little time this week. Year end tasks seem to be piling up for both of us, before we leave for Japan on Sunday. Lots of little jobs need to be done through the week after school, but we both have extra demands of reports and seemingly endless meetings, many of the gratuitous kind!

This week, I need to download a bit of stuff on Kyoto, including train timetables and guidebook kinda stuff that I need refreshed in my mind after more than 20 years away from this beautiful historic city! I remember a lot of things generally, but just want to have a lot of the bus-train-taxi interchange protocols a little clearer. As it is our intention to go as "native" as possible and use some language skills to avoid the big tourist traps and find some hidden gold, it's necessary to do a bit of ground work. We've booked a week's stay at this little house in the amazing Gion district in inner Kyoto and will travel through the city and beyond from this little haven. It will be interesting to see how Cass likes the traditional futon, kotatsu and ofuro amongst other things! Lots of adventures await.

Cass spent the entire week, and the best part of last week after work writing reports: she has to write 100! I spent the entire weekend in a "support" role watching lots of cricket and UFC while researching our trips. We got pizzas for tea on Saturday night and were unable to drag ourselves out at any other time. Cass did have her book club on Friday night as a small reprieve and reported a delightful dinner, good wine and company and a very Christmasy atmosphere at Sherri's place. She's due to host the next event early in the New Year.

We're planning to visit Nara, Hiroshima and Miyajima from Kyoto, so have both got ourselves a Japan Rail Pass for the week. I was tempted to go a little farther afield and get back up to Nagano for a visit, but we'll leave that till next time...we're so close, that we should get back there a few more times yet. Our plan for the second week is altogether different: after a week testing our down jackets in the Japanese winter, we'll be back to Taiwan for our second great round-the-island driving adventure. My other plan this week is to investigate a possible itinerary, or a vague plan at least, as we're just back in Taipei for Christmas Day before we plan on leaving again. We might even hit the expressways on the 25th if we cant find a decent Christmas dinner at one of the restaurants in town: 7/11s or roadside petrol stations for Christmas dinner would certainly be different!

I have to get some emission tests done on my scooter, pay for a new license and also investigate some e-tags for the car before we leave as well, so our week will be busy, busy. Throw in an ESL meeting for me today, a faculty meeting tomorrow and a steering committee dinner out for Cass tomorrow night and we'll be flat out. Lily will come mid-week to get her instructions for cat minding and Daniel the driver will be booked for the trip to the airport. I'll also meet our travel agent Mark on Thursday to pay for our next trip: Thailand for late March/early April!

Photos: Mel and Fe at the rugby last month, Morgan and Cat at Alleycats music night, four people immersed in their digital worlds on the subway (we're in the reflection if you look closely), Gurecki admiring his contract, and a cute backpack heading out of school one day. Not much blog action for a few weeks, but then we'll have both a Japan and a Taiwan report. Happy Christmas! (and by popular request-Valerie!- a short Christmas tree video)

Book Club on Friday afternoon/evening/night was a massive experience. We managed to traverse the length and breadth of the suburb and then the wider city, all in the pursuit of knowledge! Uli's in the afternoon, followed by Michael's place in the evening, complete with his esky full of high alcohol Belgian beer was always going to result in some tall tales and true being shared by all. We shared our books in traditional fashion, called to order by the book slapping, bile spitting Gurecki who rallied us one by one to share what we'd read while simultaneously "encouraging " everyone else to "shut the %&*$ up!"...good times!

Bund 18 on the 6th section of Chung Shan North road was the next stop and we spilled from the cabs in merriment straight into their roadside drinking tables. We were joined shortly thereafter by various other friends and colleagues who had prearranged to meet for a quiet drink, of which they were soon dis-availed as the raucous stein of book-men continued their previous discussions at great volume.

After a long and fruitful stint of intellectual discourse, said stein then headed into cabs for the long trip downtown to the Roxy Rocker, our home away from home in the depths of the south eastern party district of town. We were flabbergasted to be greeted by a phalanx of bullet proof vest wearing policemen, the group of whom were milling around the basement bar and checking ID cards as patrons entered. Our "Alien Registration Cards" seemed to pass this bizarre muster, and shortly the blue strength was again away, no doubt to flex a bit of muscle at a more likely venue for a bust (of whatever kind they were seeking!) We stayed here a long time, while the backroom DJ spun us some faraway tracks from long forgotten vinyl LPs: her dimly lit booth was our destination when we'd edged another piece of black gold from the groaning shelves.

Cass and I decided to brave the Xinyi district on Sunday to do a couple of jobs and just soak up a bit of big city atmosphere: we occasionally don't get motivated to get out amongst it, but we should as the trip never fails to excite and inspire us. The train trip takes about an hour, and the station crowd movements are intense, but you can enjoy that side of things as well. There are always some classic characters to entertain us on the train and the station provides its own theatre. The streets around the stations are a seething morass of people going about all sorts of business and also the people desperate to pry a bit of cash from them one way or another. Be it the made up "statues" in the Mitsukoshi square, the stall holders selling scarfs or kids clothes, the huge contingent of Kimonoed Japanese demonstrating the odori or even the semi-naked Aboriginal man yelling "bonjour" to us as we try to squeeze past his exposed buttocks at the area's major pedestrian crossing (!), it's definitely not for the faint hearted!

We did manage to avoid the man's famous bottom to sneak inside the Bella Vita building. Among some pretty spectacular and glitzy shopping haunts of the eastern district, this one is one of the newest and most glitzy. The foodcourt on the B2 level is known as a "gourmet foodhall" and it certainly delivers some delicious and high class meals. We had some chicken quesidillas for a start followed by fillet Mignon cooked to perfection for our main meals. Suitably fueled, we soldiered on through the weekend hordes to take the elevated footpath to Taipei 101, while enjoying the mad scenes on the mall below. The "New York, New York" building halfway to 101, has been completely gutted and renovated since last year and has been re-opened recently. We didn't enter, but were amazed to see about a further 20 restaurants open here as well as more and more retail madness....people here must be either insatiable or just crazily numerous or perhaps a combination of the two.

We spent a lazy hour or so at Page One bookshop and resisted buying a Kyoto guidebook: it just seemed full of superfluous verbiage (a bit like this blog you're no doubt thinking!). Cass window shopped through the marble lined rows of ridiculous shops, from Prada to Cartier, Gucci to Tiffany's and on and on. We caught the train back one stop to Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall, where we stopped off to buy me a new pair of Doc Martens. I wore them to school today and forgotten the "Docs" great dichotomy: even though they become beautifully molded to your foot and super comfortable over time, the early days as the rock hard leather attacks your insteps and scythes into your ankles is killer!

Home time in the later evening and we'd had a long enervating day. Wouldn't you know that right at this point of the evening, we not only caught the train the wrong way (for the first time ever!) but we then got the go slows as the MRT system slowed all their trains to a crawl when an earthquake hit Hualien, triggering a little  3 scale tremor in Taipei City. Protocols meant that the train crawled along for a fair stint before it ramped up the speed again just as we nearing our stop of Mingde.

Photos are of described scenes (although I think "Waffle Waffle" wanted their poster to read "Satisfying" rather than "Satisfactory"....don't you think?) and I'll post a little video of the inside of Bella Vita's Christmas tree as well. I'm having a little break from Caravaggio this week and reading the thought provoking and entertaining new collection from Michael Lewis, called "Boomerang".