I was delighted to join up with regular mate Wal and visitor, Trev for round two of our catch-up on Friday night down at the re-vamped Uli's. Trev is a unique character and extremely entertaining and full of life. He and Marg taught here for decades before their retirement a few years back. Trev, however, pulled the pin on working life three years before Marg, so had the chance to fill his days with further discoveries in Taipei and immediate surrounds. He did a great job: not only does he know nearly every lane-way and alley in the city but he's sniffed out many golden little "holes-in-the-wall" where you can source cheap and tasty local fare for a tiny outlay. He has also developed rich and varied cultural interests, including bonsai cultivation and playing the erhu! Despite being a decade and a half older than me, he's also got the energy of a much younger man....we get exhausted just listening to him!
The weather turned back a notch on Saturday with an incessant dribbling spit of rain accompanying a surprising cool and biting wind. We pounced on a break in the rain to scamper across the park and river to our little basement supermarket and dashed around to procure the weekly goods. Cass always comments at the end of the week that "someone has managed to eat that fridge-full of food again!" and she's always quite right: it seems impossible when we return laden, that the supplies could run out in such a short period. Cass transforms them into exotic dishes, we eat 'em, and the visit to the supermarket looms all too quickly!
On Sunday, the day was slightly more hospitable to be traveling out and about yet still a niggling wind nipped and worried, so we decided to visit the cinema in the early afternoon after a relaxing morning pottering around the house. Many of the Tienmu citizenry seemed to be like-minded as we only just snuck into the basement car-park at Shinkong Mitsukoshi before the "full" signed blinked a neon warning to incoming traffic. The movie "Get Out" was lauded to us by our online go-to site, Metacritic. It got such an exceptional rating that we felt quite compelled to go and see it, despite it seeming to be outside our usual comfortable genre band. It was a genre-blending, spine-tingling, fingernail-scraping roller-coaster ride, flipping from mystery to humour to drama to terror and back again, time after time! We were quite captivated and found the experience a little draining: we needed to go home, have a little lie down on the lounge, sip a cup of tea and debrief afterwards!
On the home front, we've been inconvenienced by a bit of a first world problem. Taiwanese apartments are invariably supplied by gas hot water via individual little gas heaters that are positioned on our back balconies and just fire up when the water is turned on. Great, energy efficient system all round but ours stopped working on the weekend, necessitating a few days of Japanese style bucket ladling, soaping up, then bucket ladling off. Cass has found it a bit confronting, but I'm quite enjoying the nostalgia trip: I bathed like this for a couple of years in Japan, onsen style! We're expecting a repairman this afternoon, much to someone's relief!
I've finished the amazing Blitzed, and am now reading an authorized history of the SAS. Cass is reading the third in the Ferrante series and really enjoying it. Photos: poetry reading, Trev and some durians!
