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The exquisite offerings on canvas, board, hessian and in sculptural form of Joan Miró was our palette of self enlightenment on the weekend. What sights we drank in at the Taipei Natural History Museum. We'd been there a couple of times before, most notably for a wide ranging Picasso retrospective, but this exhibition challenged even that one for the scope and breadth and quality of works on show.
Even after being open for at least two months, the crowd was humming if not actually teeming. A knowledge hungry audience were tethered to their audioguide's direction however, meaning we could sneak in and around the biggest crowds by edging in and out where there wasn't a crowd at any given time. We were able to gain unfettered access to some of these sublime canvases and remain to visually feast till we spied another opening "further down the line". We were particularly fond of the large bold works with a limited colour palette from a period when Miro had evolved from his earlier colour splashes and refined his choices to a beautiful "Miro blue", mid-tone red, black and white, with the occasional flick of bright yellow. His repeating themes revolving around, women, birds, peasants and stars were always evoked differently and creatively: quite a trick considering his restricted colours and style. One of our favourites was "Young Girl Escaping" which is pictured above in it's home garden in Barcelona.
After drinking our fill of surrealist fare, we realized we needed to tend to our physical needs as well! We found a terrific little Japanese coffee shop tucked away in an alley on the way back to the train station, and even though we were tempted by their menu, we opted to have only a caramel affogato each. A French/Japanese fusion boulangerie nearby mirrored the cute Gaspard et Lisa crockery in the cafe and supplied us with some bread and cakes to take home for tea....they were delicious!
Prior to our visit, we'd ventured further into the heart of the city to our much-loved KGB for lunch, before wandering the Shida night-market area to source some "decoy" jewellery for the house. We purchased about 4 different pairs of earrings and Cass has placed them in high quality jewellery boxes, just in case we get broken into again: the idea is that they'll go away satisfied with their haul!
We had a great weekend after an eventful week of new classes and new kids, not to mention new colleagues to work and team with. An exclamation point in the middle of the week was the late night telephone tree on Tuesday informing us we needed to stay home on Wednesday due to the approaching swirl of Typhoon Trami: in the end, it blew through with lots of huffing and puffing, but didn't bring the house down!
I didn't post the blog yesterday (sorry loyal readers Helen, Thurza and others!), as I was called away from class yesterday at 2 o'clock and we didn't return until 7 in the evening. Cass had taken a pretty bad tumble when she slipped on some water outside our 4th floor "Fitness Cafe" at school. They came and found me and I arrived to the nurse's office to find her on a bed and unable to put weight on her left leg, after she had crashed awkwardly on her hip area. We took an ambulance to the Chen Hsin hospital nearby and got the royal treatment, a series of x-rays indicating no break or fracture, but her pain and incapacitation pointed to the possibility of a hairline fracture. She was advised to stay off the leg as much as possible for the next few days.
She is quite incapable of independent movement at this stage, even with crutches, so I have stayed home today to play nurse. We're hoping that she'll slowly improve and I'm going back into the nurse's office later today to get some better crutches (Cassy's are far too short). She is resting relatively comfortably, but is in pain if she needs to move the limb for any reason. So, lots of drama and an ongoing issue I'm sure: we face an interesting time ahead, especially as we live in a third floor, walk-up apartment. I'll keep you posted.
Photos are of happier times this week and weekend, including "formidable" lineup of Taipei Police scooters!
Oh, and by the way, we are hosting yet another blog now. It is called "Shi" and uses the Chinese character as its heading. "Shi" means "poetry" or "poem" in both Mandarin and Japanese and therefore, is eponymous. It can be found at this link. Both Cassy and I put some poetry on there. I wrote my three this holiday and she wrote her entries in the years before. We'll indicate on here if we put another entry. Here's the link.