In the morning we went to Beşiktaş to the breakfast street, and then strolled through the neighbourhood and up to what was once an Ottoman weekend cottage set in the countryside and today is a pair of baroque houses set in a small park tightly engirdled by busy road. The gardens were pleasant, with residents […]
Long day’s travel
We’ve arrived. We left Tainan around noon, a taxi to the HSR and then a train ride to Taoyuan. It was the usual one and a half hour, which seems to be the journey time in Taiwan, regardless of where one is going. At the station we were met by the Boddhisattva and the Woodland […]
Chaand raat
It’s chaand raat in Pakistan, officially if not actually (it should actually have been last night, but the ongoing spat between the Moonsighting Committee and the Minister for Science and Technology led to Eid being declared for tomorrow in Pakistan instead of today). I ended up with something quite similar to the chaand raat of […]
Week of silence
No particular reason – I had plenty of time, plenty of interesting things happened, wasn’t feeling particularly loathe to engage with the world (at least after I decided to stop reading MetaTalk), I just… didn’t. We have finally made our plans for our next destination in August. East and SE Asia are not really opening […]
Tainan at last
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: […]
New frontrunner
A new frontrunner has emerged: we are now thinking of moving to Tainan in July. The reason for this is largely practical: Taitung doesn’t seem to have an oversupply of pleasant places to stay unless one is in a small surfing village, which itself is difficult to manage without a car. Tainan is also quite […]
Next steps
The GF and I are starting to think about our next steps. A month from now our commune will be dissolved (thank heavens) and we are considering where to go for our final month in Taiwan (however, however). The current frontrunner is Taitung, a sleepy southern town in beautiful countryside. And after that remains a […]
Golden horse
On Saturday we left, just as the crowds arrived. We took our bags and went to I-Thao for lunch, wanting to try indigenous food. What had been a deserted town was now packed, though still far from capacity, as people arrived for the weekend. This was only Taiwanese tourists, as there are none from overseas […]
Sun Moon Lake
As expected, my plan to stay to myself whilst at Sun Moon Lake failed. On Thursday we left at around lunchtime, taking bento boxes with us to eat on the train. I had Spanish in the morning – a good lesson and I’m enjoying the book – so it was an early start for me, […]
Visa run part deux
I went for my own visa run this morning. Not much to report: another lovely walk through the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, this time earlier in the day so there were men out fumigating it. There were four people ahead of me so I had about a 30 minute wait, not too bad. The application […]