With rain polluted with god knows what trickling down from the storm clouds above, there I was walking along the streets of Taiwan minding my own business when a bicycle stopped me dead in my tracks.

As I habitually do with most bicycles I see out and about I’d glanced over at this one as I walked past. I continued past it but had someone been observing me the slight tilt in my head would have betrayed my afterthought that something wasn’t quite right about this particular bicycle.

Shrugging it off I tried to continue only to stop a few paces from where the thought originally struck.

‘Wait, the saddle…something was wrong with the saddle!’

I turned around and then there infront of me it hit me… this particular bicycle appeared to be using a bar stool as a seat.

‘Now the hell does that even work?’ I thought to myself as I got closer to the bike, wondering how a round bar stool seat could be in any way remotely more comfortable to sit on then even the cheapest of quality traditional bicycle saddles available. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Although I find them nice to look at, my public enemy #1 during Chinese New Year in Taiwan is always going to be the excessive and constant use of fireworks by the locals.

Two years ago in a guide to surviving Chinese New Year in Taiwan I wrote,

With the exception of the whistling fireworks which give you some warning the firework of choice here seems to be ones that let off a massive earth rumbling boom. This variety is followed closely in popularity by the ‘rata-tata-tata’ type which sounds like machine gun fire going off for about 20-30 seconds.

The worst part of it is that Chinese New Year goes for a week and you literally have fireworks going off at all hours every day of the week.

Rain, hail or shine and any hour of the day – outside of Taiwan’s cities fireworks will become a staple of your environment for the week that Chinese New Year occupies.

And even then, with counties bordering all of Taiwan’s cities if you live on the outskirts it’s not all that uncommon to be woken up in the middle of the night by titanic magnitude sonic booms.

Naturally when it comes to fireworks and Chinese New Year the official government line is ‘it’s bad for the environment so please don’t do it (but we don’t really care if  you do)’ and on some level, I sympathise. I mean yeah, when it comes to fireworks the reality of the situation is that trying to change this local tradition would be like trying to police a ban on using chopsticks to eat.

Not gunna happen anytime soon.

So, faced with wanting to look like they’re doing something to curb the noise, air and litter pollution the excessive use of fireworks during Chinese New Year causes each year, what do the Taipei City government come up with?

A firecracker sound effects CD.

What else? [Read the rest of this entry...]

Around June of last year I paid a visit to Laodong Beef Noodles down in Banciao Distict of Taipei County and enjoyed a highly satisfying bowl of regular flavoured beef noodles.

With LaoDong’s regular flavour beef noodles being an excellent mix of spice and oniony broth, with the meat slow-boiled for around 24 hours, I walked away keen to try LaoDong’s other beef noodle offerings – in particular, the tomato flavour. [Read the rest of this entry...]

As a blog author, my primary medium is the written word. Sure I include the odd photo or video with some of my posts but my primary focus will and always will be the text that accompanies these extras.

On the subject of Taiwanese girls, I myself haven’t yet penned a definitive guide to the stereotypes out there, but I was pointed to a video uploaded late last year by ‘Funked Up TV’.

Hats off to guys who really know their medium and how to use it. The end result is nothing short of hilarious brillance. [Read the rest of this entry...]

I was on cycle ride through Banciao this afternoon (had to pick up some more winter gear) when loud dramatic music cut through the hum drum of Taipei County traffic.

Sounding like something you’d hear on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, I found myself standing outside Banciao Stadium.

Turns out there was a KMT political rally for Ma Ying-jeou tonight and I was a bit early. Usually on a Saturday night Banciao Stadium is full of people either playing basketball or walking loops around the track, but today it was an eerie coliseum of empty chairs.

Being a political rally you had tons of police and secret service looking guys around and despite my best efforts, they wouldn’t let me onto the grounds. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Lord knows I’m the last person to preach about taking a love of hamburgers too far. It was only just recently that I went inexcusably giddy when I learnt McDonalds Taiwan had started to sell the much-missed Quarter Pounder.

Still, there are times when I feel, as much of a devoted follower of the hamburger that I am, that even I pale in comparison to the true hamburger devotees out there.

This niche of society operates in complete secrecy, most likely largely due to the ridicule that follows when you tell someone just how much you love hamburgers.

Occasionally though, in rare moments of revealing clarity, a glimpse of this cult-like cross-section of society can be seen – if you know where to look and more importantly, what to look for. [Read the rest of this entry...]

With the standard price for all you can eat hotpot in Taipei city starting at roughly $500 TWD ($16.50), sometimes it pays to venture out of the city into the surrounding Taipei County.

If you look hard enough, it’s often possible to score yourself an all-you-can-eat hotpot meal for well under $500.

As the current temperature in Taipei continues to hover around 10 degrees C, today I’ll share with you a recent dinner we had at Greenness Hotpot. [Read the rest of this entry...]

I blog on a Asus ‘EEE PC’ netbook laptop and whilst it does a perfectly good job for the most part, there were times when I had way too many windows open and the entire system slowed to a crawl.

Being a laptop, I couldn’t just buy a new motherboard and CPU and be done with it so the next best thing was a RAM upgrade I’d been pondering over but never got around to.

Nothing too drastic mind you, just a simple 1gb –> 2gb upgrade, but if it stopped the netbook thrashing the harddrive and becoming unresponsive 3-4 times a week when I began to push its limits – totally worth it.

Not really having any idea where to go, I rocked up to a few local computer shops. After a few unsuccessful attempts at installing a 2gb ram stick into my netbook (Windows wouldn’t recognise the extra 1gb), we set off for what I believe is the largest computer market in Taipei, if not Taiwan.

Established in 1973 as an ‘old book’ market, Guanghua Market (also known as Guanghua Digital Plaza, Chinese: 光華數位新天地 or 光華商場) is now a five-story tall electronics paradise. [Read the rest of this entry...]

The only time I’ve ever seen a lifelike imprints on pillows was way back in the early 2000s when those photos of nerds from Japan with their ‘girlfriend pillows’ started doing the rounds on the internet.

Given the unmistakable intended use of such pillows, naturally I’ve been highly cautious of any pillow I’ve seen since then that even has the slightest resemblance of a real world object.

Thus, it was with the most piqued curiosity that I stopped and slowly turned as I walked past a Henry Cats & Friends store down in Ximending.

From the outside, Henry Cats & Friends looks like some kind of weird cat pillow fetish store. Infact, in the dead of the evening (if Ximending has such a thing), realistic cat sized pillows are pretty much downright creepy.

Thankfully, despite walking away from Henry Cats & Friends thinking I’d stumbled across some new weird ‘why have a real pet when you can just buy a pillow’ craze in Taiwan, turns out Henry Cats & Friends isn’t quite so sinister. [Read the rest of this entry...]

When it comes to talking about tall buildings, specifically the tallest in the world, for me a perfectly natural question is an enquiry as to what sits at the top of said tallest buildings.

Ask this question about Taiwan’s Taipei 101 however, and you’re just as likely to get a blank stare and indifferent shrug of the shoulders, as you are to get an answer that tells you what’s up there – but woefully fails to offer any concrete explanation. [Read the rest of this entry...]