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 [...]
NHI stands for Taiwan’s National Health Insurance program. After seeing the movie Sicko (see here) which compared US healthcare to that in several other countries, I’ve been looking for a way to get a sense of how it compares to health care here in Taiwan. (I’m not the only one, Thoth Harris wrote a post [...]
Juno finally caught one of those lizards which have been teasing her these past few weeks: Fortunately, she prefers playing with her prey to eating it. After she (reluctantly) dropped the lizard it was a little dazed, but still in one piece. But I don’t think she’ll ever catch a fish: Or a monkey: {dog, [...]
This only thing remarkable about a recent study which showed that “52 percent of elementary and junior middle school pupils in Taiwan, around 1.45 million pupils, have experienced corporal punishment in school in the first half of this year,” is that the article about it also published the survey size and the margin of error. [...]
I liked the graphics on these Taiwanese AIDS awareness flyers: {AIDS, graphic design}
Scott Sommers has written a wide-ranging and thoughtful post on education in Taiwan. The ostensible topic is globalization, but far more interesting to me is his take on testing. He argues that the prevalence of centralized testing in Taiwan is not a holdover from imperial times, but a new policy implemented by the KMT to [...]
The Tainan City Government yesterday issued a medical report showing that residents living near a closed factory in southern Taiwan have extremely high levels of dioxin in their blood, in one case 30 times higher than the standards accepted by the United Nations. … According to the report, one of the surveyed residents had 951 [...]
I honestly don’t know if I’ll be blogging about Juno every Thursday, but since she takes up so much of my blogging time I figure I might as well share some of these photos. Juno’s a fast learner and she’s quickly becoming much more manageable. Of course, when another dog is around that all goes [...]
As I said in my last post, owning a dog has gotten me out and about a bit more. That and the fantastic weather we’ve had the last few days. There is a mountain path right behind the house, and from here you can see a panorama of the entire valley surrounding Hualien city, with [...]