Chinese New Year holiday is always quirky. The city shuts down, neighbours are up and about at strange hours of the day and night, firecrackers ignite and explode at annoying and inexplicable intervals, normally sober people light up with a few fortified rice wines onboard and shops and restaurants are open or closed at random times depending on the whims of the owners. I suppose, except for the firecrackers, that pretty much describes Christmas back home now I come to think about it!
We've revelled in our time away from work after a very intense month since the Christmas holiday. It's been well documented on these pages how tech tools that you've come to rely upon can cause great turmoil when they're whisked away, and even greater pain when their promised return is delayed time after time. Cass got herself a cold, I developed a cold sore and generally, we were run-down, exasperated and ultimately, exhausted. This week long break was exactly what the doctor ordered!
To say that we slept a lot is an understatement: our bedtime inched earlier each night and our get-up times crept ever later. In the end we were even astonishing ourselves with our feats of sleep: sometimes the only thing getting us up were our aching backs from sleeping too long! We also feasted on some spectacular movies and TV series. We caught up with mindless fodder from Iview along with quality series like "The Cry" and "Shetland" as well as welcoming back the hilarious "Get Krackin'". I downloaded a slew of movies from the movies of the year list from Metacritic and we watched half a dozen of them as well!
We read a lot too. Cass continued with her "Overstory" which increasingly devolved into a very strange over-reverential tribute to all things natural, mostly trees. In tribute to characters in the book we came up with our "green" names. I'm now officially Dawei Leaf and Cass is Cirrus Fern. You can see how much time we had on our hands.....this alone took about 30 minutes to figure out!
My man in Japan, Gurecki, had sent me a hard copy of a couple of books (very kindly) and I read one of them, the voluminous and gritty "The Force" by Don Winslow, along with electronic reams of garbage from various news websites and social media. We wallowed in our freedom and unscheduled slabs of time!
It wasn't all sedentary, slothful repose. We charged (or more accurately, strained) up the 1300 steps to start the week, then nursed our aching carves for the next few days! We ate out, most notably at the always fantastic The Spice Shop and also tried out the new version of Eat Burger, now re-badged as Bad Ass Burger with a fun professional wrestling theme. We went for lots of little strolls around and about and went to see Green Book at the cinema, which was an absolute classic and highly recommended. The two leads were incredible!
We planned to travel to Sanxia for a day trip but aborted the trip midway when we saw snarled traffic, with cars bumper to bumper for kilometres on the 6 lanes of the southern side of the Number One Expressway, our preferred route back home. We swerved off the expressway to take the back roads to Bali, not the exotic isle in Indonesia, but Damshui's version of Rive Gauche! It was delightful weather and after depositing the silver bullet with some enterprising car-park guys, we wandered the mangrove boardwalks, spotted wildlife and enjoyed the riverside feel. After a moderate walk we felt in need of some re-fuelling and what better spot than the auto themed "Ton Up" cafe. The second floor balcony had spectacular river views and we dined on the English High Tea, played with Cassy's new glamour sunglasses and checked out the various car and motorbike memorabilia. It was a pleasant day of beautiful weather, tasty food, new adventures and great company! Off the expressways, you could fire a bullet down the byways, so we made it back home in record time!
Mary snuggled on the lounge with various coverings depending on the ambient temperature of the morning or evening. She was exhausted having us home, and ate into her allocated 22 hours a day of sleeping....we did our best to catch up with her, although I'm sure she's enjoying the solitude today with us back at work. Not long till Spring Break....!