That was the title my much younger sibling, a toddler, gave to Oasis’s ‘Champagne Supernova’, it was one of her favourite songs at the time, as it was mine. I was not a toddler but a teenager, a startlingly naive and underexposed one, including to music which made me receptive to anything and everything regardless […]
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Relieved sigh
Our visas have come through, phew. It always seemed likely they would, and really, given the global lockdowns where could we go, but it’s still a relief. After our Chinese lesson this morning we went straight to the Bureau of Consular Affairs to collect our passports. There was about a 10 minute wait, then we […]
Breakfast of champions
This morning the Boddhisattva and I rose early and went off to breakfast at Fuhang, the most famous breakfast place in the country and which usually has queues of an hour or more. Thank you global pandemic, the queue was only 10 minutes this Sunday morning and soon we had our bowls of soy milk […]
Brief return to a colder clime
Today we had our second social engagement of the week. We returned to Yangmingshan, albeit a different part of it: a very curious part indeed. This was US officer housing upto the 1970s, and the hillsides here are dotted with prefab American houses, like a little suburb in the hills. It was a windy, rainy […]
Dinner party
We had a rare dinner party last night. Correctly speaking it was our flatmates who had the party and made all the arrangements, we just showed up. The guests were a Taiwanese couple who was known through work. He was a teacher, quiet and a bit inarticulate, and she was the precise opposite: an entrepreneur […]
Cry for help
In Italy they were singing from their balconies, in Iran they hung banners with verses from their windows. In Pakistan, at 10 at night, they go to their window or rooftop and call the azan at a time when the azan is never said, calling people to prayer to call to God for help. It […]
Better deal
We went to our first class at the city school today. I was relieved that it turned out to be very good; the textbook remains as dire, but the teacher was genuinely good and made excellent use of its exercises so that perhaps for the first time I was confident I was listening and understanding […]
Visa run part deux
I went for my own visa run this morning. Not much to report: another lovely walk through the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, this time earlier in the day so there were men out fumigating it. There were four people ahead of me so I had about a 30 minute wait, not too bad. The application […]
Visa run
This morning the GF and I went to apply for a visa extension. It all took far longer than we had accounted for. First, a half hour walk to the visa office, passing through the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, possibly the only truly monumental building in the country. Then on to a restaurant for lunch, […]
Drowning
The Boddhisattva had been given two tickets to the new Paul Chiang exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. She did not intend to use them so we took them off her. Off we went down to Yuanshan where the museum is located (also the big farmer’s market in the expo centre), stopping first for […]