When I came to Taiwan to teach English I brought with me my assortment of office attire I’d been wearing around the office at my previous job.

Nothing too top of the range, but I became quite fond of Geoffrey Beene’s slim fit shirt offerings and paired them with some fitted Taro Cash trousers. Cheap enough to be affordable and decent quality enough to look good.

Upon arriving in Taiwan I’ve thus far been disappointed with the local clothing options. Shirts are ill fitted and baggy, or worse still offered in a short sleeve option and pants come in a range of styles from slightly boxy to Spongebob Squarepants boxy and everything inbetween.

I short, I’ve been dreading the decisions that will need to be made as my local supply of clothing gives in to wear and tear. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Like most Australians, I get a swell of pride when I see the green and gold battling away on the sports field. Doesn’t matter the sport, event or who we’re playing again.

Despite not usually enjoying watching sport, when it comes to competing against the world I enjoy nothing more then seeing the green and gold trump anyone who gets in our way.

With this in mind though I’m the first to acknowledge that green and gold doesn’t look too crash hot off the field. That’s why we always have a separate uniform for off field antics.

Yesterday corporate uniform designers Table Eight Corporate unveiled the Australian team uniform for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

Unfortunately, to say our sports team is having an national identity crisis would be an understatement. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Melissa Neylon was a passenger in her boyfriend’s car back in February 2009. Her boyfriend, Jayke Baldwin was speeding.

Not surprisingly Baldwin eventually lost control of the car and hit a tree. Melissa presumably wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was thrown out onto the road upon impact.

The car Baldwin was driving then crushed her to death as she lay on the road.

All of the above is factual and there’s no disputing of the events as they occurred. Despite this however, when facing the Australian court system, Baldwin was found guilty and received a three year suspended sentence.

For no other reason than Jayke Baldwin is a cross dresser. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Foreword>: The following article is a continuation of ‘Taiwanese girls and crazy ex-boyfriends‘. You’ll probably want to read that to get the proper context of this article.


If you want to experience the worst of a culture, forget travelling off the beaten track, forget booking holidays to places you’ve never heard of and forget moving there and hoping a country’s real culture eventually exposes itself to you.

All these methods might work, but if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty of certain aspects of some cultures – just do what I did.

Start dating the locals. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Religion is a funny old thing in Taiwan. In day to day life you almost don’t see it. There’s the odd temple here and there blended into the landscape and outside of certain religious days/events, there’s no real schedule to attend them or anything.

It’s almost as if for most of the Taiwanese, religion is more of a superstitious convenience. It’s easier to attribute luck, Buddha, ghosts or something else for anything good or bad event that happens I guess.

That said, quite like the west you have the token religious populations but then you also have the die hards.

A few months ago now I was cycling through Hsinchu county and came across a place called Emei lake. As I cycled through Emei lake, out of the blue and seemingly in the middle of nowhere, popped up the biggest freaking Buddha statue I’ve ever seen. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Simply put, the last 24 hours of my life have had me going out of my mind.

When I came to Taiwan I’d heard a few stories about Taiwanese girls and their sometimes crazyness. Stories about extreme jealousy, being bombarded with phone calls and SMS messages and wanting marriage commitment after a few months were all in the back of my mind upon arriving.

Thus far my journey into Taiwan’s dating scene has been hit and miss. I’ve been yelled at, watched girls fight over me, been dropped like a hot potato for no apparent reason, had some girls try the subtle ‘buy me this!’ hints dropped at every opportunity they get and so on and so forth.

Mind you I’ve also had some wonderful times too, but thus far the negatives far outweight the positives. Well, almost. I guess the positive of feeling connected with someone overrides the negatives while it lasts.

Anyway, I digress. When I arrived in Taiwan I believed I was more then prepared to face the challenge of the local dating scene. Conscious of the cultural differences and aware that I’d be fighting stereotypes at every turn I thought I had a good shot.

Nothing though, not anything I’d read or heard about prepared me for the crazy ex-boyfriends though. I guess I’ve just been lucky thus far in that regard as it’s never come up. Until now.

Here’s how it went down. [Read the rest of this entry...]

For the most part, the debate on whether Australia should become a republic or not seems to have largely died.

In the lead up to recent election, Julia Gillard stated it wasn’t something she wasn’t prepared to bring up until the current Queen died and Tony Abbott has declared himself a staunch Monarchist. Regardless of who eventually gets into power it seems the republic debate is off the table for a few years yet.

This fact was recently picked up on by Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry. McGorry entered into the Australian republic debate today by claiming that ‘the nation’s political leaders are too worried about focus groups to push for a republic‘.

With minorities having an increasing power wielding capacity in our political landscape (one only needs to look at the current hung parliament to see the evidence), it’s easy to not only see where McGorry’s coming from, but also to agree with him.

…but then came the fineprint. [Read the rest of this entry...]

This story broke a few days ago and upon reading the initial reports in the early hours of the morning, I secretly hoped that fourchan or some other online vigilante group would get involved.

For those of you that came in late, so the story goes that Stephanie and Darryl Mann found their cat Lola sealed in a rubbish bin. The couple heard Lola meowing from the bin and came to her rescue.

Luckily the Mann household was equipped with a video security system and upon watching security footage, the couple witnessed one of the most brazen acts of animal cruelty I’ve ever seen.

Watch the footage for yourself; [Read the rest of this entry...]

Last week I found myself walking along the beach with the girlfriend. We’d had a nice dinner and gone for a scooter run around the place and decided we wanted to walk it off some.

With the sun down and the mercury still at a pleasant 28-29, a walk along the beach seemed the perfect way to end the night.

So we thought.

Walking along the boardwalk at a casual pace enjoying the atmosphere, being Taiwan most people were either still working or had family business to attend to. Save for a few lonely teenagers we pretty much had the boardwalk to ourselves.

As we discussed life in general just did the happy couple thing, out of the corner of my eye I suddenly realised we weren’t alone. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Aside from the detrimental health effects of being overweight, one of the other main changes one experiences when they pack on the kilos is the obvious change of appearance.

Infact most people raise more then eyebrow when they see someone they haven’t seen in a while who has undergone a sizeable weight change. In the extreme cases there might even be shock at the change of appearance.

I know this has happened to me personally but thankfully it’s never extended past the ‘holy crap’ gaping mouth open stage.

With this change in appearance comes the obvious need to maintain anything that relies on your physical identity. Doctors records, a photo ID for work perhaps and of course if you’re using it – your passport.

What should be common sense to most seems to have been oblivious to one Derrick Agyeman. So much so that after being refused re-entry into Britain after a weekend away, he’s now suing in an attempt to try and make a buck off it. [Read the rest of this entry...]