busy weekend
I reeeeeally need to update my website; it’s been rocking this millennial theme since, well, around the millennium, and is hopelessly dated. If I don’t update it soon I won’t have to; I’ll just say it’s deliberately retro. Yeah, that’ll work. The problem is that I don’t know what I am doing when it comes to web design. I’m going to need a new computer in the near future as well. It’s always something.
The weekend, as I predicted, was madness. I met Chenbl at Jing-an Station in Yonghe on Saturday morning, where we got on a bus down to Taoyuan to join the wedding banquet of our friends Sean and Lulu. One of the nice things about a cross-cultural wedding, I thought, is that you can throw any old stupid event into the mix and everyone will assume that said stupid thing is a “tradition” of the other side, and nobody will be the wiser. But the weather was brilliant, the food good and the ceremony kept to a minimum, so it wasn’t bad, as weddings go.
In fact, it went so smoothly that we were back in Taipei in time for the Muddy Basin Ramblers’ set at Daniel Pearl Day, which was held at the Hakka Cultural Park this year. The place was so packed with young white people wearing pastel polo shirts, sunglasses and khaki shorts I could have sworn I’d been transported back to Lexington, Virginia. I’d told David I couldn’t guarantee I’d be there, so he got Sylvain to fill in on bass, so I sat out most of the first set. This was just as well as I was feeling a little under the weather. The second set was pure acoustic, held on the sidewalk, and didn’t really work because the music from the two stages drowned everything else out. Still, people were dancing.
I managed to get home at a decent hour, and took most of Sunday off to rest up, venturing out again in the evening for a dinner with Sean’s parents. Again, good food and company. Sean’s father apparently writes serial fiction, a la the old shorts they used to play in the theaters during matinees, but in print form, so perhaps more like Dickens or in Black Mask. I don’t know as I’ve never seen it, but I’d like to read some of it. At the very least it must be more interesting that this blogging business.