One of the things I miss about Australia is the availability of late-night ice-cream. Taiwan’s climate is perfect for it yet when the sun goes down, for the most part you’re restricted to Taiwanese ice-dessert places or 7-11 prepackaged icecream. There is the odd icecream parlour around but it’s mostly overpriced Haagen Daz or some [...]

Having lived on my own for quite a while here and there, you soon learn that cooking is an essential skill to have, or that being broke all the time from eating out sucks. Here in Taiwan with the abundance of cheap cooked food available my own cooking skills have been somewhat neglected but from [...]

Whereas most of the houses and architecture in general of Taiwan seems stuck in the (18)80s, wander around long enough and occasionally you’ll run into some delightful little gems. I was cycling through Miaoli County’s Toufen Township one day when I happened across what I can only describe as a wonderful little moat house.

Taiwan is full of enterprising people who hold a diverse tapestry of employment positions. Most however are overworked, underpaid and in the face of rising living costs, increasingly struggling to make ends meet. And then there’s this guy: You can’t really see him in the photo, but tucked away in that blue truck is a [...]

With Leela almost going on a year since we found her up in the mountains of Miaoli, we figured it was time to start investigating our options on getting her neutered. Thankfully we hadn’t had to take too many visits to the vet thus far. Apart from the usual vaccinations a puppy needs and some [...]

Yesterday I was out and about exploring the mountainside of Xindian in south Taipei when all of a sudden a roaring hum blasted through the relative silence I’d been enjoying. Instantly throwing me back to my Command & Conquer days, the familiar air raid siren noise was something I hadn’t heard in a long time. [...]

I hate using public toilets for number two as much as the next guy… but when the unavoidable time comes and there’s no other way – the last thing on my mind has been ‘do I have any toilet paper?’. A question that, if I’d bothered to ask myself, would have time and time again [...]

One of the big tourist attractions of Wulai Township are the hot spring baths that heavily populate the main township area. Ranging from just a few hundred TWD to a few thousand an hour, on a cold winter night we decided to try out a mid-range looking hot spring bath called YuFuin.

Health safety in Taiwan is often reduced to deciding whether or not a place looks clean enough to eat in. More often than not… this is even further reduced to ascertaining just how clean a venue might be based on its popularity. Like anyone else, Taiwanese people generally don’t like eating dirty food. As for [...]

I read an interesting article last week on the Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters (COSWAS) calling on the Taipei government to be mindful of the preservation of historically significant buildings when considering urban renewal projects. Their calls came after the building that houses their headquarters, known as the Wen Meng Building (文萌樓), was recently [...]