Mountain tasting

We’re looking for somewhere new to live. Right now we’re renting an apartment in the middle of town. It’s fun, hectic and overwhelming in a Chinese inner-city kind of way but for the longer run we’ll need more space where the kids can play. We went for a drive around Hsinchu yesterday and there are all kinds of things available. Much of it pretty manky it must be said, and there are lots of developments put up by fly-by-night contractors with a taste for faux Greek columns.

To our horror we really took to a development with large, American-style, houses. Suddenly we understood how our parents felt back in the 1960s when they migrated to the suburbs. We who always hated the suburbs.

Then we took a road leading up into the mountains. After only a few minutes a large vista opened up. Mountain range after mountain range lined up in that unlikely pattern which Chinese ink paintings make famous. We looked around and saw oranges on the trees and tea plantations. Now this is the place to live. Imagine waking up every morning and tasting mountains for breakfast.