We came to Tainan last night, at last by ourselves for a short while. In the morning I went to collect the GF’s birthday present – I’ve rented a Playstation for a month and bought him The Last of Us II, a game he dearly wanted to play. It was a bit of a hassle: […]
Home style dining
A remarkable success this morning. It was a working day for both of us but first we went to a restaurant we had heard of – not a restaurant but someone’s house where they cook and serve in their living room. We arrived and no one spoke English and the cook came out of the […]
Crab
An excellent lunch today. It was a working day, and we went to famous old seafood place where they specialise in crab. Deepfried with deepfried garlic. Delicious. Some very tasty food here in Kaohsiung. Though crab is undoubtedly a hassle to eat.
Good luck tiger
We took the commuter train out to a suburb which was very KL like, at least like the parts of KL that are dominated by sterile condos and no pedestrians. It was very, very hot. We’d found a rather nice dim sum place, and then went on to the Kaohsiung art museum which proved rather […]
New town
Here we are in Kaohsiung. It was a hassle to get here as we both had our suitcases as well as a large ikea bag filled with assorted kitchen goods and comforts of life, which nearly broke my shoulder off when I took a turn carrying it. We are staying in a most astonishing Airbnb. […]
Dumpling day
Today was the dragon boat festival so we had rice dumplings in memory of the old poet who was thrown into the river for speaking up against corruption and the people of the town scattered rice dumplings into the water so the fish would not eat his body. Annoyingly, when the Boddhisattva brought the dumplings, […]
Ring of fire
What a triumphant day today was, the day of the eclipse. This was an annular eclipse, on the day of the solstice, with a long but very narrow band of totality which happened to pass through Chiayi, the town from which went to Alishan a couple of months ago. Though knowing of course that the […]
City life
Today, Saturday. A searing hot afternoon, and we went off to the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art. There was an exhibition on, called City Life, with the low entrance fee that is usual in this country, a pleasant change from London museums and galleries. It turned out to be one of the best contemporary art […]
Protest in the park
This morning, the GF and I went to 228 Park to join the Black Lives Matter protest there. It was a curious affair. Every foreigner in Taiwan (excluding migrant workers) seemed to be there – the crowd was about 90% non-Taiwanese, and I suspect many of those who appeared Taiwanese were Americans of Taiwanese origin. […]
Back to Beitou
Today’s Chinese lesson went better than Monday’s, when both the GF and I felt rather stupid and beaten down. It made me very thankful that I was always quite good at school, as it was a taster of how deadly it is to be made to feel like an idiot and given no time or […]