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.