Read more about his experience (and see some wonderful photos) here!

Thanks Michael!

Michael, Scott, Graeme (thanks to Eva Wai).

The alternative explanation is simply too stupid to be true.

And yet people wonder why I travel by bus rather than scooter.

Taiwanese scooter helmets.

A baby kitten with poo on its face.

Students dancing.

Mu: (thinks) Ah! A tea shop. I’ll get myself a nice cup of tea.
Mu: Hey there. Can I have a cup of lemon green tea please?
Guy: Sorry?
Mu: Qing, yi ge li mon lu cha.
Guy: Oh, ok, lemon green tea.
…
Guy: You want some sugar?
Mu: A little bit, thanks.
…
Guy: You want a bag?
Mu: Err, no, it’s OK, I’ve got this bag here.
Guy: Ok, $20.
Mu: (hands over $20)
Guy: Oh, I forgot – do you want a house?
Mu: Err… sorry?
Guy: Do you want to buy a house?
Mu: Err… you mean a house, like a place to live?
Guy: Yeah.
Mu: Err… no thanks.
Guy: Oh, ok.

God, how I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say “No, just the tea will do, cheers”. But Taiwan always takes you by surprise, coming at you from some crazy angle, orthogonal to reality, that you can never possibly anticipate.

I look forward to the day when I can take this kind of thing in my stride… but it seems unlikely to happen. Even today, after a game of badminton, someone introduced themselves as follows:

“Thanks for the game.”
“Hey, you too. It was a good game.”
“I am called person.”
“Err… you mean, you are a Taiwanese person?”
“No, my name is person. P-E-R-S-O-N.”
“Err…good to meet you, person. That’s certainly a very unique name you have there.”

I guess this is part of why I love it here. It’s like living inside a giant magic 8-ball.

Sunset over Taoyuan.

Pastel mountains.

Taoyuan, the dark city.

And then someone brought a cute black and white rabbit along to the badminton courts, and before you knew it, some crazy people started gently nudging it around a bit with their racquets and playing Rabminton. Awesome. I think that will be the next sports buzz in Taiwan. It was, like, uber-sweet.

Oh and I found a Taiwanese Army Surplus place that sells 3 things mainly: boots, ropes, and 100% genuine Taiwanese Army Ninja Swords. Yes, for real. That’s about the most awesomest thing I’ve ever seen, ever, even including the time I saw a pirate being decapitated in slow-motion by a electric guitar while a ninja strummed a totally wickedkiller power-chord on another even better electric guitar.
In real life.

And someone at the hospital took a long, spooky, war-of-the-worlds-snakey-thing-shaped throat examining device and threaded it down my left nostril so they could check out a longterm throat problem I’ve had (like… yechhh), all the while having a conversation with me in English and asking me to keep saying ‘eeeeh!’ as they spoke. It was like… totally…. invasion of the body snatchers, and I was like… totally….. Leonard Nimoy. And it was like… totally…. a group of 5000 Yorkshiremen building up to the biggest ever ‘EEH, BY GUM!’ the world has ever heard – and then some.

Then they insisted on taking my picture (thankfully not while having my throat actually being nostrilarily examined with the spooky Is-Tom-Cruise-Hiding-In-Your-Lungs?-Device) for some reasons I don’t quite fully understand, or even at all.

And the weather was just perfect and the food was just spiffy, though I think someone spiked my kiwi-fruit icecream with betel nut, since my gums seemed rather overtly tingly afterwards.

Superbly brill. Definitely one of the most weird days I’ve had since I got here, or, like, ever. Totally.

Warner Bros.

For those of you living in Taoyuan, I can confirm that the cinema in Taoyuan city centre has it showing 8 times per day right now, lunch till late, prices from 170 to 220 NTD. Don’t miss it.

UPDATE: I should probably add this little nugget about films & cinemas in Taiwan. Basically there are two main rules that are always observed:

Rule 1. Nobody likes surprises, so in every area with public transport, there should be several huge TVs blaring out trailers that spoil every plot twist of all the films currently at the cinema. The perfect example of this is Saw, where the front part of the Taiwanese DVD cover is a frame taken from the very end (if you’ve seen it, you can guess which plot twist I’m thinking of). Nice, real nice…

You see this in Taiwanese TV shows too. The last thing they do in each episode is a spoiler for every single plot twist in the next episode. Heaven forbid you actually enjoy the damned show.

Rule 2. People should be forcibly evacuated from cinemas starting approximately 1 millisecond before the last frame of the main feature – after all, who cares who made the film, anyway?? And as for the occasional easter egg that crops up if you watch right through the trailers? Forget it.

You just have to get used to the idea of some cinema rep standing up and screaming at everyone “GET THE HELL OUT OF MY G*DDAMN CINEMA YOU STUPID BUNTS! C’MON, WHAT ARE YOU MORONS WAITING FOR?? B*GGER OFF!!!” as the credits start to roll. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s shouting. Then, they just turn the projector off. Very annoying.

In case you’re one of the curious people, “Suwadee” is part of a Thai greeting. Suwadee means both Hello, or Goodbye depending on circumstance. It’s a little like how ‘ciao’ is used in Italy.

Normally, for men to politely greet each other, they would say “Suwadee krahb” (which actually sounds more like “sawadee krah” when Thai people say it). Remember that Thai has it’s own alphabet, so “Suwadee” or “Sawadee” is just a transliteration of a Thai word into an English form to make it easier for westerners to say.

As you meet and say it, place both your hands together (palms together, fingers straight) in front of your chest, as though you were praying. If you’re a girl, say “sawadee kaa” instead. It’s good to keep your hands high up your chest as a token of respect.

You can also say it when parting from a conversation politely.

You can learn more about this greeting here. Given the vast numbers of Thai people in Taoyuan (and Taiwan as a whole), it probably doesn’t hurt to memorise this phrase… =)

Suwadee Krahb!

Why anyone in Thailand would go to McD’s is beyond me…
(This picture is borrowed from betsygoestochina.com. Thanks!)

Michael Turton paid a visit, reminisced about old-style Taiwan, and indulged in some street-side KTV.

The Bushman pays a visit to a duck and seafood restaurant in Taoyuan.

Prince Roy shares a picture of a garden with zillions of statues of Chiang Kai Shek.

Some spontaenous Tai Chi at Taoyuan airport…

And if you were around on Valentine’s day, you’d have seen the area around the railway station become almost impassable to traffic or pedestrians, as several department stores simultaneously decided it would be a good idea to have a band play some thumping guitar choons… err… romantic music.

I’m basing this on the reports at Digitimes and elsewhere, that read: “Nintendo’s Taiwanese distributor ‘Hakuyu’ has stated that the new Wii system will fail to make it to the market any time before the Chinese New Year in February.” I also interrogated the staff at a few branches of a major electrical store (3C), and they suggested they expect their stock of Wiis to arrive during the Chinese new year period.

So far, all that has been available here are Japanese or US import models – and getting your hands on one of these a month or two early has come at a pretty high price – anywhere from a 25 to 100% markup, depending on which model you want.

Despite the fact that the Wii is very thin on the ground, I’ve seen them hiding in a few small gaming shops, and a few weeks ago, I even saw people playing with a Wii on a huge projector screen, in a cordoned off area bang in the middle of the Taipei Main MRT station. When I’ve finished celebrating Chinese new year, I’ll dig out a picture.

Meanwhile, in Taoyuan, we have a ‘gaming school’ (and store) near the city centre. They have two Wiis set up outside with two controllers each, a giant flatscreen TV and the best Wii games available – Rayman: Raving Rabbids, and Wii Sports. You can find this store very near the middle of town, and it’s a great place to go if you want to get some hands-on experience playing on the Wii.

Starting at the train station, go forward over the first crossroads immediately outside the station, past “Idee”, and then turn right at the next crossroads (where there is an under-street pedestrian tunnel). Go straight up this street, passing “Nova”, and take a left at the next big crossroads. Walk ahead till you see the store on your left.

So, a total of 5 minute’s walk from the railway station will see you at the door of the store, opposite “Ali Baba’s Indian Restaurant”. Just remember: straight on, first right, first left, and it will be on your left hand side. The store’s name is: “Kukanemoto Game Classroom”, 03-331-0088, www.tastegood.com.tw.

The store also has imported Wii’s available for purchase: 10000TWD for the japanese import; 16000TWD for the US import. There will not be much room to negotiate since stocks of Wii’s are so thin on the ground just now. It’s 1700TWD for games; 1000-1700TWD for extra controllers, which I guess is reasonable compared with extras for the XBOX360 or PS3.

Alternatively, if you are prepared to wait a few more weeks, you may start to see Wii’s showing up in stores like 3C, priced around 8000TWD (according to the 3C staff members I spoke to…). But you may face a long and boring Chinese new year without one.

In the meantime, if you find yourself unable to Wii for a prolonged period, it may comfort you to know that simply walking around Taoyuan can make you feel like you’re in some kind of computer game. Take this street for example, near the police station and bus stop…

Giant pointy bits of metal, waiting to drop. It’s just like playing Tomb Raider.

I hope he’s paid well.

What on earth could possess a man to undertake such employment? The money behind the housing boom in Taiwan. Personally, I hope this guy is getting a decent hourly wage, because he is doing his job really well. You’d think he’d take a break every now and then, but no, he’s tireless – as long as he stands there, the arrow shall wobble – come hell or high water.

This leads me into my main topic for this post, housing and bubbles. Presently, like most of the world, Taiwan is suffering from a unsustainable housing boom. I know this despite the fact I know almost nothing about Taiwan’s house prices. Like almost every country in the world, Taiwan dropped its interest rates to very low levels a few years back and hasn’t been quick to put them back up. Tada, unsustainable housing boom, the same as in every other country that did it.

Low interest rates mean money is cheap to borrow. If money is ‘cheap’, then people will want more money in exchange for their stuff, i.e., you’ll get inflation and prices will go up. Some of the inflationary side effects of cheap lending have been held back temporarily by a group of factors in many countries; importing low-cost foreign workers (keep wages low); exporting manufacturing to cheap countries to keep costs low (mainland China and India being the main beneficiaries); and continually improving technology and production processes (Taiwan being famous in this regard!).

The simple fact, though, is that houses cannot be made in the PRC or India and shipped to Taiwan. And when money is cheap, demand goes through the roof and supply can’t keep up. Consequently, prices go up, up, up. In the short term, at least. Further, low interest rates over a long period of time eventually force people to look elsewhere besides floating/fixed interest bearing deposits or bonds, as a place for their long-term savings. In other words, low interest rates screw up your long-term retirement saving plans. This in turn fuels further excess demand for housing, as housing mutates rapidly into a mainstream investment option for the masses.

However, house purchases are almost always funded by borrowed money – and whenever interest rates eventually go up again, the cost of that borrowing can rapidly become unsustainable on a large debt. This leads to people defaulting on loans (and forced sales) and also people running for the doors before they are forced to sell (discretionary sales). Further, as the cost of borrowing (interest rates) goes up, housing becomes much less attractive as an investment option as its return (i.e. the rent you get paid as the landlord) remains roughly stagnant compared with the rate of growth in interest rates. Consequently, few new investors in housing will come along. And the economic instability surrounding this period spooks businesses, and puts a freeze on hiring – and that drops the employment rate and means no big payrises. That in turn discourages people from making any big new speculative investments.

So when interest rates go up, a number of pressures on house prices emerge and they all push the cost of housing back down again. You can see this in the US just now, and parts of the UK. You can see this in Japan as well. In fact, the shock of the initial housing collapse in Japan last decade was so severe, that even when money was being literally given away for free (0% interest rates), no one would ever touch housing again, and so house prices continued to decline for 10-15 years.

Given the danger of housing bubbles when they collapse, why on earth would any government allow this to happen – much less every government (UK, USA, Australia, Europe, Japan, Taiwan….)?

It turns out, housing bubbles are more or less a dream come true for most governments.

• Boosts taxes. If your government taxes the estate of a dead person (Inheritance Tax), then boosting the value of the estate boosts the inheritance tax. If you tax property transactions (the buying and selling of houses), tax income goes up during housing booms. If you tax houses each year based on their value, again, tax income rises. If you tax ’short-term capital gains’, then the speed of a housing boom usually ensures higher taxes too. A huge surge in building can lead to higher tax returns from that sector too.
• Boosts employment. “Let’s build some houses, lads!”. Employment makes voters happy; employment brings in more taxes.
• Makes voters happy. There are few things people love more, than to be told that their personal ‘pile of bricks on a piece of dirt’ is worth twice as much as it was last year, and that they are now a millionaire (on paper). Oddly, they will feel ‘rich’ as a result of this, even if they can’t actually move to another house without spending the same amount of money, and even if they are in fact still living in the same crappy pile of bricks they were living in 5 years ago.
  Don’t believe me? Look at the number of leading world politicans who were easily re-elected for a second term in the last 5 years, despite unpopularity on issues such as domestic security, international affairs and spending. UK, USA, Australia, I’m looking at you!
• Solves your pension problems / demographic timebomb. Generally, old people own houses. Young people do not. In order to get a house from someone else, you must pay. Housing bubbles ensure that the flow of money from young people to old people is very high. This can be used to solve the problem of a pension crisis, where the government cannot afford to look after all the old people in the country. Ever noticed how it’s always your grandparents that ask when you’ll be buying a house and settling down? It’s an old-person conspiracy, I assure you =). Unfortunately, this kind of intergenerational wealth transfer rains shit upon the lives of young people, and leaves them trapped in debt with no chance of a better life, and little ability to afford a family. But who (in government) cares? It saves the government from being seen to directly raise tax in order to hand out money to old people, if they can indirectly cause the same flow of funds from young to old.
• Renews dead housing areas. “Wow, it’s a swamp, but apparently it’s magically worth $20,000,000 dollars, simply because the area next to it is ‘worth’ $40,000,000 and isn’t a swamp. Let’s drop some bricks on it and sell some houses, quick!”.
• Easy to make it happen. Simply drop your base rate of interest at your central bank, and magically, you get a housing bubble with very little need to interfere politically or craft cunning laws to make it happen. Best of all, you can feign ignorance of the whole thing! Simply declare your central bank independent then in reality stack it with cronies to do your bidding. Why is it that all the world’s central banks seem to have their key decision makers chosen and frequently swapped around by politicans, I wonder. Independence? Hah.

It brings some problems however.

• Ruins the lives of naive young people If your first action as a young adult is to take on a mortgage that will take 50 years to repay, then you are unlikely to be living a particularly enjoyable life between the age of 25 and 75. There will be no ‘housing ladder’ to move up. With interest rates only likely to go up (or inflation staying low and therefore, limited wage increases), you will be living in the first house you buy for the rest of your life. Consider yourself warned.
• Drops your population. “Honey, do we get a 3 bedroom flat instead of 2 bedroom, or do we have a family?”. You think I’m joking? Ask any young couple you know if they’ve had to push back their plans for a family, or work hours that don’t allow time for a family, as a result of the miraculous ‘housing boom’.
• Causes economic catastrophe when people realise they’ve been tricked. Bubbles seldom burst slowly. Look at the UK housing crash of the last 80s, the initial phases of the Japanese crash of the early 90s, the stockmarket crash of 2001.

Summary: Housing bubbles are a great way for governments to create ‘good feelings’ amongst the public that can ensure re-election effectively. They make economies look great, by sacrificing the hopes and chances of young people on the alter of failed pension provision. The inter-generational transfer of wealth that occurs at the peak of a housing bubble destroys lives on a very long term basis.

Here’s a nice quote to end this post:

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of the voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” – Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, A Treatise of Economics, Yale University Press, 1949

Girls, stay safe. There are five serial rapists on the loose in Northern Taiwan (including Taoyuan) and Kaohsiung city. This isn’t really ‘news’ as such, since they’ve apparently been on the go since 1997, but when you’re in a place as friendly and awesome as Taiwan, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that there are nutcases out there too.

A recent addition to the local population gets sick of city centre life, moves to the countryside, and explores the pottery of Yingge.

Mickie Cellow posts some images of Taoyuan’s new High Speed Rail terminal (HSR is a Japanese bullet train system connecting the North of Taiwan with the South, using 300 kmph trains). The terminal was apparently placed underground because it runs very close to the airport.

Here’s the name. Just look for the christmas tree lights and you’ll be fine.

After a few weeks of trying to find some free time, I went there again with my friends and had yet another stunning meal – 3 people, 7 or 8 dishes, and drinks all came to $1000TWD in total.

Pete wonders if they are open yet…

They have the entire menu translated into English, and they have a good range of different types of food including several types of salad and fish dishes (if you’re vegetarian/vegan). Decor and music are… well they’re not quite as good as the food, let’s put it that way. Bring earplugs.

Lemon Fish (li mon yu) – $200TWD. So good I literally ate it twice, to the disbelief of the staff.
In my books, two fish for $400TWD is a bargain.

Tom ka gai soup (chicken/not spicy). $150TWD for a giant bowl. Spicy salad $80TWD.
My advice? Mix some tom ka gai with the sauce from the lemon fish.

“We highly commend the tasty food of Random Thai Place.”, say Pete and Angela.

After dinner, you can gaze in awe at the all-powerful Benq sign.

Plain old rusty barbed wire – this stuff is ubiquitous around here.

So, having found this exciting, shiny, lethal, razorwirey stuff, I thought it would be interesting to take a picture of it. The problem being, that it was positioned so that I had to either take a bad picture (holding out my camera in front of me, pointing down, and unable to frame the shot correctly), or take the picture I wanted, but leaning out over the razor wire. I decided to lean out, as carefully as I could, using one hand and my knees to grip the wall and therefore prevent a premature painful and messy demise.

I had to take a couple of shots to get the framing I wanted, so I ended up leaning right out over the razorwire (with a 3 metre drop below me) for about a minute. Long enough, it turns out, for a local guy to sneak up behind me in a suspiciously quiet blue truck, and suddenly yell out

“HALLLOOOOAAHHHH!”

This one’s for you, Mr Batshit-Crazy-Blue-Van-Helloing-Dude.

Well, it didn’t do my heart any good I can tell you, as I barely stopped myself falling onto several rows of shiny, painful slicyness. I don’t mind the odd casual ‘hellohhh!!’ but the enthusiasm and timing of this one was very nearly the end of me.

Once my heartbeat went back to normal, I went off to find the temple…

An aside: The title of this entry is inspired by a local idiom, ‘expensive to the point of death’, which is a convenient way to describe the price of almost everything, when you have white skin and you’re in South East Asia. In Mandarin it’s: 貴死 (guìsĭ) [thanks Mark, Pete!]

I think it’s pretty safe to conclude that Taiwan’s choice of imports often seems rather surreal from a western point of view.

These signs started popping up on buses around Taipei in response to the bird flu epidemic in Asia, as a means of helping control the outbreak. Literally overnight, it seems, it became necessary to either leave your ducks at home, or take them on the scooter. One thing for sure is that duck-accompanied public transport has become a definite no-no.

Ostensibly, this kind of thing helps control bird flu transmission. In reality, it just makes ducks’ lives awkward, and forces them to take taxis instead when they’re in Taipei.

What is strangest of all though is that these signs seem to be confined to Taipei. In Taoyuan, we welcome ducks. If a duck can scrape together $15 TWD and explain to the bus driver where it’s trying to go, then as far as I’m concerned, it has earned the right to use public transport.

Where I grew up, it was possible to see thousands or tens of thousands of stars at night with your naked eye. Here, so far I’ve been lucky to see 40 or 50 – but at least it’s something, and I feel like I’m still in touch with the night sky.

This week, I’ve been standing on top of high buildings at sunset, straining my eyes while hoping for a glimpse of Comet McNaught. This comet was identified a year ago by an Australian astronomer, Robert McNaught. Since about a week ago, it has been visible around sunset and sunrise in many countries, starting with the northern hemisphere and more recently the southern hemisphere. You can read a little more about it here: Sci-Tech Today.

Unfortunately, Taoyuan has had cloudy weather for the last week or so, especially at sunset, which is quite infuriating. The only compensation I’ve had is that there have been some pleasant sunsets to enjoy.

Taoyuan’s factories are often staffed by (low paid) foreign workers – a topic which very easily stimulates discussion when presented to locals, irrespective of their own nationality. However, economic disparities aside, this influx of foreign staff represents a boon to the palates of students travelling between the city centre and university. By visiting the restaurants in the industrial areas, you are almost guaranteed to get food that is:

a) cheap
b) completely authentic

and only very slightly

c) contaminated by heavy metals.

The area midway between the city centre and Guishan seems to be predominantly Thai. This isn’t surprising – Taoyuan is the most ‘Thai’ city in Taiwan, with over 30,000 Thais among the 70,000 registered foreign workers in the city. There is another area of foreign worker’s restaurants that can be more easily found, by taking the underpass beneath Taoyuan railway station and look around. The area near the railway station seems to be predominantly Indonesian and Vietnamese, though a few Thai restaurants such as ‘Suwadee’ can be found. (…however, Sudawee wasn’t very good the last time I ate there…)

If you’re interested in trying some authentic food from the Thai restaurants near the Guishan area, here is what I recommend you do. Go to the Tonlin department store (near the train station – ask the first person you meet to point you towards ‘Tonlin’). Around the side, near some small food stalls, the number 7 bus departs. Step onboard, pay $15 TWD, wait 10-15 minutes, and you will drive past a big building with a “BENQ” sign outside. Step off the bus (there are two stops within 200 metres), and you will find yourself in a little street with at least 5 different thai restaurants.

My favourite restaurant is the one nearest to the Benq building entrance – approximately 50 metres away. The scenery and music really isn’t the best in the world, but the food…. the food is to die for. Truly, the most incredible Thai food I’ve found so far, much better than the other Thai restaurants I’ve found in Taoyuan. Try the lemon fish (lee mon yu), and tom ka gai soup, and mix the sauces together to experience an absolutely divine combination. If you’re feeling brave, they’ll be happy to supply a spicy salad that will take the roof of your mouth off.

Beware though. Many bad experiences that I’ve had in Thai restaurants here stem from the friendly nature of the hosts. If you have white skin, they will avoid putting anything spicy (or indeed, flavoured) into their cooking so as not to surprise you. Insist on getting your food spicy! (”hen la”)

To help your taste buds recover afterwards, a convenient steamed bread stall can also be found near the Benq building, selling a very decent variety of sweet, soft, freshly made bread, for about $12 each. Highly recommended for mopping up the chilli that will now be stuck between your teeth.