It was packed last night, but the scary thing is that since last year, I only knew about 5 or 6 people, which shows what a big turn-around of foreginers there is here. It doesn’t seem like most people come here for the long term, although considering the huge ammount of English teachers and what appears to be a big influx of University students, at least from Sweden, I guess it’s not so strange that there’s a bit turnover.
I’m going to try to get my finger out and update the site more regularly, as it seems like I have a fair few readers, despite the fact that it’s not updated on regular basis. If anyone has suggestions of places that we should go and eat at, please send me an email, you can find my email address in the contract me section at the top of the page.
Well, first off the guy who gave us the estimate for the move was off, way off, instead of the two vans he told us we needed, we needed four. Great, that bumped the cost up to twice what we’d estimated. The cable guy turned up and wasted loads of time mucking about and it turns out there was some kind of blockage in the holes from the basement up to the place and then he disappeared for about 2h, no idea what he was doing. Meanwhile it started to rain, for about 10 minutes, so the AC install guys calls up and say they can’t come, as it’s raining, so they’ll come the next day…
The cable guy finally comes back, manages to somehow bodge the wires in place and tells us that the place is wired “funny”. So he refuses to put in the internet properly, so now we have a cable modem sitting in a cabinet built into the wall, with a power and Ethernet cable coming out of it. All this because he claimed it wasn’t his job to put cables inside the house and we had to hire someone else to do that. What????
So the following day the AC install guys turn up, dump a load of stuff off and then goes missing for an hour, then one of them and another guy turns up and starts installing it and by now it’s already afternoon. So what happens, well, after they’ve wasted loads of time talking crap and mucking about, they manage to install the unit in the front room, but they’ve only got the wall unit up in the bedroom, but there’s a 15 minute downpour, so they tell us they’ll be back tomorrow to finish off the job… What?!?!?!
That night we ended up sleeping on the blow-up bed in the front room as it was so hot. By now it’s Sunday and the AC guys turn up, spends 20 minutes doing whatever they’re doing and they’re gone. All done, of sorts. Of course they left a huge mess for us to clean up and they forgot to put on some kind of protective thingie on one of the outside units, so lets hope it doesn’t break because of that. I really, really hate sloppy people like that.
So due to various stupid things, we had to wait two days before we could get the place in order after the move, which really is annoying. Most other things have gone smoothly and we had someone from IKEA turn up to put together some furniture we bought there as he was twice as fast as I would’ve been as he had all these fancy power tools. We also had someone come and put up some blinds in the front room, as I’m not really good with drilling straight holes…
This weekend we had a small moving in party, not everyone we expected turned up, but part of the reason was that about an hour before we expected people to start turning up, there was a massive downpour. I had made some tunnbröd with salmon and gravlax sauce, meatballs with mashed potatoes and sauce and for dessert semlor and apple pie. All in all it was a success and even Brenda’s friends seemed to quite like the food.
Sunday night I bought myself a second hand bike, a rather large Giant Yukon, as for some reason it’s not that easy to find larger bikes here. It’s the most advanced bike I’ve ever owned, it’s got more gears than I think I’ll ever use and it got front suspension and a suspension in the seat post. It rides quite nicely, although I had to take it on the MRT (which by the way is NT$80 no matter how far you go, but only allowed on weekends and holidays and then only to certain stations) and then ride it home, which was interesting. I haven’t really ridden a bike for a long time and I didn’t know the exact route, so I went too far, twice…
At least it should be nice to ride it along the river here, although we need to figure out how to get down to the bike paths along the river, but it’s not a long ride to get there at least. We figured it’s best to start on flat ground and there isn’t too much of that if you want to ride a bike away from traffic here in Taipei, but luckily there are some nice long bike paths along the river. You can ride all the way from Xindian in the south to Danshuei in the north, which is a very long ride, but we might manage to do it some day 😀
Poor little Rainbow was neutered this week, but she’s been a good girl and not licked the stitches so she just had to wear the collar for a day or so. She really hated wearing it and when we took her home she was a bit drugged as well and kept bumping into things. The only problem was that I left the collar on the front room table and it had a rolled up bandage which was used to tie it around her neck attached to it. For some reason she decided it was a good thing to eat this bandage when we were out, something that can’t have been too healthy for her.
We only realised what had happen later that night when she was sitting on the bed and I noticed a poop in her ass. Brenda got some tissue to try to wipe it off, but it turned out it wasn’t just poop as it was the bandage that was coming out, so she had to pull the whole thing out was was about 15-20cm long… Poor Rainbow, but it’s hard to control what she chews on and eats. She’s eaten a few bits of string before and seems to like to pull bits of string out of towels. From what the vet said it can be lethal for a cat to eat strings, but I don’t know how to stop her from eating them when we’re not around.
At least she seems to be just fine, although she left little bits of poo all over the place, yuck…
After a lot of though and time spent discussing what we’re going to do, we’ve decided to move. We’re going to move back into Taipei, as it makes a lot more sense being there as Brenda works there and I spend a lot of time visiting companies there. We’ve found a nice place and we’re going to go and sort out all of the details on Saturday, so hopefully all that will be in order so we can move in some time in mid August.
The woman next door has driven us slightly mad and it’s time to get away from here. Although there’s nothing wrong with this flat, well, in fact, it’s actually bigger than the place we’re moving to, we just can’t hack it here any more. Besides, fuel prices are going up and its getting expensive driving that far every day for Brenda and it can be a long drive when the traffic is bad.
The new place is actually brand spanking new, they haven’t even finished building the whole complex and it looks quite nice. They’re meant to have a gym, a spa, a small cinema and some other neat stuff, so all that sounds good and the price we found a place there for was very reasonable. Fingers crossed, Brenda will get this place sold quickly as well.
It might not be super convenient located, as you have to take a shuttle bus to the MRT station, but it still beats having to take a taxi to the train station and then the high speed train to get into Taipei. It’s also close to the mountains and there seem to be some places where you can head out there. It’s also closer to some of our friends which should improve our social life a bit, as we’ve been part lazy and part too far away for a lot of stuff, so it’s time to get active and social again…
Anyhow, we’ll see how things turn out, but by this time next month, we should’ve moved if all goes smooth, which I guess it never does.
I almost forgot, on Friday we’re going to Flavours along with what should be a big group of other Swedish people as the Swedish Trade Council has arranged a get together there, so that’ll be cool.