Taiwan
Green
Red A recently had a post which seems to imply that Taiwan’s own hosing bubble is about to burst, with housing prices way above their actual value. I haven’t shopped for a place here on the East Coast, but I know that things are a lot cheaper and that there is rampant housing speculation.
Looking […]
Trees
I woke up to see this holocaust outside our house. It seems that one of our neighbors who is a member of the home-owners association was complaining about ants coming into her house from the trees, so the solution was to cut them all down.
So now, instead of the beautiful dappled light and green leaves […]
Taiwan 2.0
I wanted to announce two projects which I think should be useful for English speaking residents of the Taiwanese interweb:
First is a Yahoo! Pipes feed which aggregates Michael, David, and Bent’s roundups of the English language blogsphere in Taiwan. That’s one RSS feed just for their link roundup posts. You can view it on the […]
高一生
The other day I went to see an interesting performance built up around the life and work of Gao Yi-sheng 高一生. Who is Gao Yi-Sheng? There isn’t much about him in English on the web, but here is a short blurb from the Taipei Times:
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BBQ
This is one of those “only in Taiwan” stories: Police in Hsinchu 新竹 captured an escaped convict when they noticed a man attending a police-sponsored BBQ.
During the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 almost every Taiwanese family has a BBQ, sort of like the Fourth of July in the US. The practice has become so wide-spread that […]
Föhn
The typhoon currently cutting across the northern tip of Taiwan didn’t hit us too hard in Hualien, but we did get something I’d never experienced before: a föhn (fénfēng 焚風 in Chinese).
Paraphrasing Wikipedia, a föhn occurs when a deep layer of prevailing wind is forced over a mountain range. As the wind moves upslope, it […]
Job Announcement
Job Announcement
College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University [Taiwan]
http://www.ndhu.edu.tw/
POSITION DESCRIPTION AND DUTIES: The Department of Indigenous Cultures and the Graduate Institute of Ethnic Relations and Culture invite applicants for three (3) open-rank faculty positions in the humanities and social sciences, beginning February 1, 2008. We are seeking applicants who do research in […]
Foreigner Friendly?
Every Taiwanese has a National ID Card 身分證 with its own unique number, not unlike a Social Security number in the US. The difference is that every legal permanent resident in the US also has a Social Security number, but foreigners living legally in Taiwan are given a different number. Instead of a National ID […]
Prices
Almost every night the news features at least one story about rising commodity prices. A few extra cents for spinach or milk might not seem earth shattering, but I know how hard my students scrimp and save to get buy. At the school lunch buffet I load up my tray with a bit of everything […]
Driving Morals
I’m very proud to announce that today I finally passed my Taiwanese driving exam and received a local driver’s license. This is no mean feat. You’ll find that many foreigners drive without a license because the process is so difficult. I would not have managed without the help of one of my students, Pisaw who […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
