Cass continued to feel washed out and lethargic through much of the Chinese New Year break, so we selected pastimes and outings that wouldn't wear her out too much. Of course, back to school today, she's beginning to feel marginally better: it's always the way isn't it?

I mentioned I whipped over to the massive hardware store(previously B&Q) to get a shelf for our shower recess to replace the rusting shower caddy that I think we brought from Australia! I managed to source one and get it installed when I got home, but in the meantime, I enjoyed the stroll around that part of town, taking in a pocket park with the most magnificent sakura blossoms and even spied a lady going real old-school with a peasant's hat, fixed gear bike trundling the main drags in search of cardboard

We took a trip to the coast mid-week and it was a bit of an effort just to get rallied and prepared, get the scooter up to school where we have the car garaged and get out on the mountain road. I packed all my surfing gear to take, mistakenly believing the wet-suit was already on board. The mountain road snakes its way through the maddening procession of flower viewers on their way to the Yangminshan flower clock and surrounding walks, yet once in the misty heights around the fumaroles, the traffic eases and the car can be put through it paces on some racy little sections and corners. It's always four seasons in a day up there and it didn't disappoint. The surf at Jinshan harbour was almost non-existent, so we drove round to check the fishing boats bobbing gently on a mirror like surface, just having a little break before being pressed into service at twilight for their daily exercise. Jinshan proper was a mess and although I was vaguely tempted to go out, my mind was made up when I discovered I was definitely sans wetsuit! We ventured around the area a little, held our breath negotiating some crazily narrow country lanes, saw some artists painting idyllic scenes and ate a crude lunch at the biggest 7/11 in the world.

We watched some great movies during the week, one of which was not "Kingsman", which we saw at the cinemas! It was another calm outing for the sicky and it was good to just be able to get out and about for a while. Cass bought some perfume at the department store opposite (remember all those empties from last week?!) and we had a pleasant little trip.

I went up to Yangminshan again during the week, this time to help Wal on his little plot of land as he extricated some juniper trees from their spots and assisted with a cutting back and re-planting strategy that he wanted to implement. Unfortunately after the 30 minute trip up there, we discovered that someone had pinched the shiny new shovel he'd left up there just two days previously. It was such a shock to us, that someone would steal something here that we valiantly scoured the countryside for the next half hour or so to see if someone had "borrowed" it. As we investigated, I was able to soak up the beautiful sun and bucolic scenes of these tiny plots, everything from semi-commercial trees and flowers to tiny market gardens and gentlemen farmers like Wal tending their hobbies. There were cute little temples set up on ridge lines, ingenious little irrigation and drainage systems trickling water around the fields and tiny paths dividing and connecting the various boutique garden beds. We ended giving up on our plans and retiring to a coffee shop just down the road to imagine what could have been!

Cass was able to rally a little later in the week to have a luncheon outing with her friend, Kristin. They haven't had a chance for a catch-up for quite some time, even missing out on the regular book club meeting last Friday. So with stories and chats to catch up on, they drifted their lunch into the late afternoon and didn't know where the time had gone!

I had a few beers with Wal on Saturday before seeing various incarnations of the bands that I go to see semi-regularly. I took a little video of their last couple of songs as they had already cleaned out the patrons and been told to keep the microphones either off, or really toned down. It was pretty good (if I don't say so myself!) for a one shot video, as I tried to keep a steady hand, not jump around too much and vary the angles. It helped that I know all the guys well, and they played along with the whole thing!

Oh, I mentioned we did a bit of movie and screen viewing? Apart from various cricket matches, we saw Nightcrawler and Whiplash before the academy awards (this morning) and rated both of them very highly. We've also nearly watched the entire latest series of Homeland....oh my, that stuff is a real heart starter and we've discovered that it is far too stimulating as a pre-sleep viewing option....it gave us both some tossing and turning nights!

Photos: guitar shop has a fun door handle, the huge hardware store, cherry blossoms and pointy hatted recycler. Jinshan shots, Yangminshan plot shots, and the last a familiar scene from the 1000 steps. Cassy and I are both reading the same book at the moment, both electronically, she on the Kindle and me on the iPad. It is The Secret Place by Tana French...it's great!

OK, so this is an unusual position for me to be in writing the blog. We're on holidays! Normally, I'll take a breather in a break, but thought I could get a few words down, especially as my darling has once again succumbed to sickness and is snoozing in bed with two hot, brown furballs!

Chinese New Year break descended quickly on us last Friday afternoon after a hectic week at school. We were both feeling unusually exhausted and I'd managed to get myself infected with a minor cold. Unusually for me, as I can't remember the last time I was sick, I was determined to shake it off and not let it spoil the week ahead. Cass was really looking forward to her book club meeting on Friday night but, boom, all of a sudden, she started to feel terribly achy and weak, to the extent that she barely got through her last classes in the afternoon and had to pull the pin on book club.

Meanwhile I was ensconced with Wal, Shaun and Rock down at Uli's, but quickly arranged to ferry Cass to the doctor's when he opened again at 7 p.m. In the end, he diagnosed her with a flash "flu-like" virus and got her on an electrolyte drip for an hour and a half. After we got back home and she was bundled off to bed, we had high hopes for a quick recovery.

On Saturday, it seemed Cass had a kind of miracle recovery and although still tired and weak, she felt a little better. I decided to be very Chinese and do a clean up for Chinese New Year and proceeded to do a massive cull of my wardrobe, the evidence of which can be seen in a photo above. Many huge bags of old t-shirts, pants, jeans, shirts, jumpers and jackets were subsequently deposited in the charity bin just up the road. Cass was similarly inspired and did a boutique thinning of her own, including 14 empty bottles of perfume adorning her underwear draw! Afterwards, with Cass still feeling OK, we took advantage of the sunshine to scooter over to Aubergine at Neihu, where we had our usual curry sets.

It was, of course, a real false dawn. Cass felt nauseous after the meal and just wanted to get home to bed, where she has stayed pretty much for the last 24 hours, except to go and visit the "old idiot" again, who has now changed his diagnosis to a UTI, after Cass suggested it to him. Tests confirmed the diagnosis, so at least now, albeit belatedly, she is on the correct medication.

I went out and about a little this afternoon and ditched the scooter for a long walk in the perfect temperatures over to the big B&Q hardware store near the night market to try and source a stick-on shelf for our shower recess as the "shower caddy" we have there is all rusted and unsightly. I got something that I hope will work, fingers crossed. I think I'll go for a further wander in the night market tonight as well as source some food for dinner as Cass said she'd be pretty much incommunicado for the foreseeable few hours. Let's hope she starts to feel a little better soon!

Photos: CNY inspired. Kids from local schools entertained us on Friday, a Harley lolled in front of me at the traffic lights the other day, "Holy" crepes(!), the moop, tongue lashing temple favourite oversize puppets, a gift bag, some of my girls dressed up for CNY and the big cull!
P.S. I've had to update our cover photo yet again, after just a few months, as the Metro map quickly becomes outdated these days. This map now includes the new green line which I alluded to a few weeks back when we ate at Ruth's Chris.

 

Hurtling over swollen city streets and dodging bottlenecks and snarls is daily practice driving in Taipei, drivers negotiating their way through streets and alleyways to find the sought after on-ramps to the city's extensive network of raised roads and expressways. 

Our experience is similar, and after years in the city, we've worked out all the shortcuts and tricks needed to negotiate the snaking network of arteries elevated above the ground level smog. In fact, we've traveled on the road pictured above many times as it is a lead-in motorway to the main arterial roads slicing south and east of the metropolis. We're just glad we weren't in this taxi, nor indeed, this plane!

We received a terrible shock when news broke of another TransAsia jet plummeting out of the sky, this time in a congested and heavily populated section of the city, just east of the inner city airport midweek. It seems there are conflicting reports about the pilots' role in this disaster: either they're heroes who deliberately threaded the crippled plane through high-rise buildings before tilting it to crash land in the river, or they're the villains who turned off power to the wrong engine in panic. Perhaps, both? Anyway, suffice to say it was the talk of the city, and after another of our oft traveled roads got consumed by a deadly landslide a few years ago, we are feeling very fortunate.

After our "Indian Summer" of a few weeks ago, we were seized by the bear of winter this weekend, wakened from her hibernating slumber to roar and tear with ferocious power! We were hunkered down most of the weekend and it is even colder today here at school, the temperatures dipping easily into single figures. We're pretty much masters of the cold winter these days and we get lots of experience as our real taste of summer is taken up by our trip back home to Australia's mild winter and we've made a habit of traveling to northern Europe at Christmas time. The difference of course, is that those aforementioned countries really do cater for their climates. Taiwan's few power cold days are suffered in light, uninsulated apartments built for blazing summers: with barely an overworked blow heater to disperse the freeze...may as well just wave a cigarette lighter around!!

One possible plus from this blast of arctic fog is that the Chinese New Year holiday at the end of this week, may be, for once, relatively mild. The lunar alignments are particularly late this year, meaning that this frigid week is when we would normally have our week off. Instead, next week's long range weather forecasts indicate quite mild temps and sunny skies....we can only hope!

We took a little stroll round the neighbourhood on Saturday to source some trays to put all the cleaning products and other paraphanlia that accumulates in the under-sink cupboard. We had a pipe blowout when we discovered that pathetic corrugated plastic piping doesn't like getting Drano poured down it: it melts! Anyway, all fixed (by a 72 year old plumber who is studying Chinese literature at university...we feel so lazy!) and ready to be restocked we dived into the Alladin's cave that is the De Shing Road double storey hardware store. I'm guessing this is about 100th the size of  a Bunning's back home, but I think it might have even more stock.....you can get anything there!

We got some Oggi pizza for takeaway and settled in for a bit of a televisual marathon with our favourite Morinaga caramel ice-creams for dessert...yum. Sunday, we welcomed back Insiders from the ABC to view over breakfast, beamed over Apple TV, and all seemed right with the world: even if it was just a tad frigid! Photos: I thought I'd just leave the one shot of the air crash for a bit of impact. Video of same.

Jack Cheng from the boutique Danish Warehouse vintage furniture gallery here in Taipei, emailed us when we were in London to tell us he'd sourced and imported one further chair for us from Denmark. We were so excited, as now we had a possibility of a set of four "No. 71 Arne Olson" mid 50s chairs to eventually get back to Australia to team with our beautiful table of the same origin and similar vintage. His gallery is such a joy to visit: the wood rich with scent, pefuming the space with a robust, heady cloud. The look and feel of these crafted designer chairs and tables is exquisite....trouble is, the longer we stay and look, the more we want to buy!

Satisfied with our upcoming purchase (just waiting now on a quote to ship them to Merewether), we decided to celebrate both that, as well as our slightly delayed anniversary dinner, by making our way from the deep south west across to the mid east district. To do so, we went on yet another new MRT line, which seem to be opening with periodic fanfare. Our destination station was the same as one we have visited many times on an overhead line, but this was the underground link. It took a while and we were so spun around in the stations corridors and escalators that I had a momentary failure of my inbuilt GPS when we exited! After a bit of a false start the wrong way, we headed back in the opposite direction along a diagonal road for a shortcut to one of our favourite "special meal" places, Romano's Macaroni Grill. Upon arrival, we were dismayed to see a different sign illuminating the spot and a cleaner inside who told us it was "closed, and not opening anywhere else". Oh no!

Luckily for us, the same building housed the famous Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, and although they were fully booked, we assured them we could eat and exit before their booking arrived. We enjoyed a full linen, liveried service experience that was comfortable and slick. The main drawcard, the food, was just sublime. We'd been enticed to try it for some years now as we were hypnotised by its targeted advertising on Cathay Pacific airplanes: mouthwatering steaks portrayed on screen before the movie features began...a little cruel as the airline trays shortly followed! Suffice to say, it was even better than the ad suggested. We enjoyed a 2011 Barossa Valley shiraz, clam chowder, two succulent fillets with accompaniments and ended up sharing a massive slab of the best bread and butter pudding ever produced by man....we'll be back!

Both Cass and I had to squeeze in our pieces of "extra professional work" over the weekend as well. We've got a mid tern accreditation review at the school this month and a hodge-podge of questionably talented linguists had compiled what was a sprawling report in need of savage editing and major grammatical and protocol overhaul. Cass is one of the acknowledged experts on the faculty, so she was specially targeted in a, "Can you help us out?" campaign. She spent a lot of time on Sunday trying to correct the myriad of errors in this document! I, on the other hand, decided to make a cameo appearance on Saturday afternoon at a conference run by one of my colleagues which most others on my team were attending. A regional check-in on the current EAL programme we're using, it was as boring as watching a photocpier spit papers in slow motion, but I got a bit of face time and flew the flag.

On Sunday, we were inundated with major sports events, and I managed to get access to all of them by utilising various media! I recorded the UFC on our cable TV streaming service to watch at a later time and settled in to watch the one day cricket final streaming through the regular desk computer. Later on, concurrently with the cricket, I was able to use the Australian Open 2015 app on the iPad to stream the tennis final through the Apple TV onto the TV screen. I was getting exhausted just with the thought of it. While Cass slaved away on the work document with an occasional check-in on a grammatical point, I juggled the visual sporting fest. In the midst of it all, I decided to get amongst it myself, so scootered up to the foot of the stairs before attacking them with gusto for the next 40 minutes or so. Back home and feeling absolved of all guilt, we thoroughly enjoyed watching all three big events unfold into the night.

Photos: On Friday, I visited Wal's little pottery studio he has set up about equidistant between our two places and was very impressed with his set-up. MRT advertisement, Cass near a crystal shop en-route to Ruth's Chris, Virgy really does like the heater (!), some shots of the steps and one of a line of funny little trucks that are adorned for a funeral.