Taoyuan Nights

One of the quirks of Taiwanese life is that people are very often prepared to do unusual jobs to pay their bills. Consider the Wobbly Sign Man. He stands on a corner in Guishan at busy times of the week, and wobbles an arrow above a sign, to try and get people to look at [...]

Derek Thibault is shocked by riot police and 300 protestors in Taoyuan complaining about the owner of the Idee chain doing a runner with their wages, and brings a Taiwanese woman to tears with his heartfelt busking in Taoyuan. But what song was he playing? The answer may surprise you. My favourite blog entry of [...]

In a previous post, I talked about finding authentic food in Taiwan by going to restaurants in industrial areas that are full of foreign workers. I also mentioned a fabulous Thai place that can be found nearby the ‘Benq building’ bus stop on the number 7 route through Guishan in Taoyuan County.

Here’s the name. [...]

I was walking towards Yingko the other day, trying to track down a temple that was hammering out ‘bong, goink, bong, goink’ at an impressively loud volume across the hills of Gweishan. As I walked along, I noticed that in one case, the omnipresent rusty barbed wire surrounding the factories of the area had been [...]

One of the greatest joys of shopping in Taiwan is finding things that repeatedly slipped through the safety net of good judgement. Particularly, I’m thinking here of the many films that simply should never have been made in the first place, much less duplicated en masse on DVD and marketed in a department store. Let’s [...]

One look at this sign on a bus, tells you all you need to know – that it isn’t fun to be a duck with places to go in Taipei.

Photograph of blatant anti-duck propaganda on a Taipei bus service near Da’An MRT station.
These signs started popping up on buses around Taipei in response to the [...]

One of the things I like most about the areas away from Taoyuan city centre, is being able to see the sky at night. If you were born in a densely populated city, rather than out in the country and away from bright lights, then you possibly don’t feel the same urge to stare into [...]

I often find myself travelling around town on the number 7 bus, which links Taoyuan city centre with Ming Chuan University and the Guishan area. This bus takes a slightly roundabout route, and passes through a good part of the industrial area of Taoyuan that is near Guishan.

One of my favourite landmarks on [...]