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 [...]

I didn’t catch wind of this story till last night or I probably would have run with it yesterday. It headlined the Taiwanese local news but didn’t make an appearance in English until the late hours of the evening. Usually my girlfriend sends me stories like this (in Chinese) as she knows I’ve got a [...]

When it comes to marriage, I’m a firm believer that if it’s ever going to happen then it’s not going to be without thoroughly getting to know the other person over a number of years. None of this ‘we just met yesterday let’s get married I love you forever!’ crap. Unfortunately however the above appears [...]

You’re sitting at a bar minding your own business. It’s late enough that the groups of friends have gone home but not too late that everybody who set out to go home with someone has. ‘Hey you, what do you think?’ You turn around and standing there is a young woman in a dress. Seconds [...]

Thankfully I’ve never been through the experience of coming home to find my wife or girlfriend in bed with another man. Had I of found myself in such a situation here in Taiwan however, I could have very easily found myself in jail for trying to do something about it – as one Mr. Huang [...]

Life can’t be easy for Hello Kitty. Worshipped by millions of helium-voiced pint-sized squealing Asian girls around the world, for some unexplained reason the cat-like cartoon figure has obtained unmatched cult-like status. From pre-pubescent girls who don’t know any better to disillusioned teenagers struggling to find meaning in their life to young women desperate to [...]

Trains in Taiwan are usually pretty clean. There’s garbage collectors who run through the trains every hour or so and I’ve yet to walk into a carriage and find my seat dirty or damaged. That said, be warned the next time you board a Taiwan Rail Administration (TRA) train that you might be sitting in [...]

So you’re browsing around the internet… doing what you normally do. Checking the news, a little bit of Facebook (or Google+ if you’re a hipster), watching some YouTube… etc. All of a sudden your email notification starts beeping and before you know it you’re staring at your inbox wondering what to do. Somebody you’ve never [...]

I was sitting there at my desk lost in my own writer’s world and furiously typing away, when the front door burst open. ‘OMG LOOK WHAT I HAVE!’ My girlfriend slammed down what appeared to be an A3 cardboard design of some sorts and I looked down at it, slightly confused. ‘So uh… what’s that?’ [...]

If you’re out and about during Chinese New Year in Taiwan, chances are you’re probably going to notice an unusually greater amount of non-Taiwanese guys out and about trying to keep themselves occupied, but still looking like they’ve got nothing better to do. For hundreds (thousands?) of Taiwanese girls every Chinese New Year heralds the [...]