Sunday was meant to be a day of practicality. I went out with the intention of purchasing three new tops, one of them black, cleansing oil, face wash and a few other bits and pieces. I returned with a black linen top and the intent to return and buy a linen shirt. Plus two bowls […]
An ozzy brunch
The four of us decided to go for brunch today. This is a meal that enrages me more often than not as it is all too often over-priced, mediocre in flavour, more interested in Instagrammable plating or catching trends than quality food. Plus, the sight of hollandaise sauce from a packet, or a baked-from-frozen croissant, […]
Terrible error, perhaps
I have take a step that I might regret, which is that I have arranged for, and paid for, Spanish lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So on Mondays and Wednesdays it’s Chinese and then a switchover to the other language. I am more worried about the Chinese suffering than the Spanish; since I know the […]
On my own
A very pleasant day today, on my own terms for once. It was a working day but unexpectedly light as something didn’t come in when it was supposed to. Meanwhile the GF had a meeting at lunchtime, so I went off by myself, first to a very well known lo rou fan place where I […]
More distancing
Yesterday morning the GF and I walked westwards, through the Botanical Gardens which were small, but free and very pleasant. I do like tropical botanical gardens, the wild lushness combined with being well-kept. The streets were quite quiet, late morning on a Sunday, and Easter I suppose, though there were few indications of that despite […]
The only way to visit a museum
The GF and I returned to the National Palace Museum, using two-for-one tickets we’d purchased a month or so ago when we went to its southern outpost in Chiayi, on the way back from Alishan. Social distancing measures have been imposed in Taiwan, and this mean that only 100 visitors were allowed into the museum […]
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 […]