Taipei heat wave

It’s the hottest May on record, says our Chinese language teacher. It is immensely hot and the flat has no movement of air. Our room has a large glassed bay window which gets full sun in the mornings, while the other rooms are dark. In the evening the thermostat in the bedroom reads 28 degrees, […]

Test

We had our Mandarin test this morning. Both of us passed with exactly the same number of wrong answers, though slightly different marks as the weighting was different. We preened a little at scoring in the high 80s until our teacher mentioned that the pass mark was 75%. Well, it’s done. I haven’t had a […]

Still in seclusion

Another day in seclusion. This morning I had my Spanish class, which went quite well – a bit of reading (Primero estaba el mar by Tomás González), some conversation about dogs in prams. A brief chat with the GF last night which was pleasant, and the start of the third of The Wire which remains […]

Sudden relapse

A catastrophic relapse into misanthropy yesterday afternoon, after a very pleasant morning — work finished early, a good Chinese lesson, a pleasant cup of coffee and conversation with the GF. I returned, remarking on what a good mood I was in, to find that one of the others had locked the front door from the […]

A partial recovery

I succeeded in putting myself in partial isolation today, at least until dinner when the Woodland Creature and the Boddhisattva returned home early so I made food for them as well (or at least for the Boddhisattva; the Woodland Creature decided to order in). Luckily the break was enough that I was fairly cheerful during […]

More people

After moaning yesterday about too much sociability, today was even worse: the GF and I both felt we had been in hiding too much and so we made a plan with our flatmates to go for a stroll and visit the national museum (not the National Palace Museum) and then meet our linguist friend for […]

More rarified

A slightly more rarified dinner than usual as it was a celebration day and we went to one of the small, expensive and experimental places for dinner last night. It was a nice dinner, and less blighted by the various dietary restrictions than usual. At the end was a souffle, which made me wish that […]

A simple pair

We were a simple pair at our Chinese lessons. It must have nearly driven the teacher mad. My most unfortunate moment came when we were practicing sentences and she asked us ‘what is your teacher’s name?’ and we had no idea. After staring at each other wildly for a few minutes I said “Liu”, trying […]

Return to Spanish

I have just come out of my first Spanish lesson in months. There were some shameful shortcomings, but still a good session despite having to do it over Skype. I was a bit startled to see my teacher, the one from Medellin, had blinding white hair, partly thanks to lockdown perhaps. Their lockdown is in […]