City stroll

Yesterday we went for a stroll. First a taxi down to Xinbeitou (since the shuttle bus was on reduced hours for the weekend). We shared it with a couple from Japan and their young daughter who are staying in the building and will be taking over our flat when we leave this week. The wife […]

Sakura hunt

We woke early in the morning, before sunrise, to climb up behind our bed and breakfast to what we were told was a beautiful place to watch the dawn. We made it up just as the sun was coming out. It was not the sea of clouds, but it was a sunrise over hills and […]

Mountain train

Early in the morning – well, around 9 – we took the train up to Alishan. This was a small Japanese era train which passed behind small houses and flowering trees, passed little wooden stations from that era, and left all signs of people behind and climbed up the steep central hills towards Taiwan’s most […]

Fish soup

We took our bags to Chinese lessons today – it was the other teacher who is much, much better than the one on Monday. She took our Line accounts (which I created only for the purpose of Taiwan travel as I don’t use it otherwise), and has been sending up pictures and videos all day. […]

Hmm

I was not pleased with my Chinese lesson today, and neither was the GF. It is guided entirely by the textbook, which is not very good, and the teacher didn’t do a great job of actually teaching. I do understand that reciting and memorising is an important way of learning languages, but it’s not the […]

Leashed rabbit

This morning we went to Tamsui, a town by the sea and a river and visible from our windows. The day I arrived was the final day of the Chinese New Year and I watched fireworks all along it, far below our condo building on a hillside above the town. The Boddhisattva is in Vietnam […]

Nostalgia

We had our second Chinese lesson this morning – I don’t think it’s going nearly as smoothly as the Spanish lessons and I’m feeling rather nostalgic about them now. Here we are three people in a small windowless classroom, poring over a textbook and shouting out seemingly meaningless syllables in unison. There, I sat in […]

Grim

In the morning the GF, the Woodland Creature and I took the MRT down to Shilin for the first of our Chinese lessons. Shilin is in the next ring in towards Taipei, a proper city neighbourhood, with a mix of international shops/ department stores and small hip cafes on the other. We stopped first for […]

160 flights of stairs

Our flatmates were away to visit a friend so the GF and I returned to Yangminshan to tackle the stairs again. 1.6 kilometres, it turns out, equal about 160 flights of stairs if the iOS’s app is to be believed, though I’ve never really understood how it measures these things – surely changes in elevation […]