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 […]
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
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 […]
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 […]