Taoyuan Nights

Quoting from the FT,
“China’s stock market, one of the world’s best-performing bourses, plunged nearly 9 percent on Tuesday as profit-taking by local funds snowballed before a parliament session beginning next week.
The market’s biggest drop in a decade did not appear to be triggered by concrete news, traders said. But institutions scrambled to lock in large [...]

Everyone (on TV) seems to have gone bonkers yesterday, as the Shanghai stockmarket dropped 8% during 1 day’s trading. Hong Kong, Asia, America, London, Europe dropped too, in knee-jerk reaction as people freaked out… all the talking heads on TV shows started murmuring about doom and gloom, how this could be the end…. time to [...]

In this article, I looked at how simple indicators and a smattering of economic knowledge can give you some useful ability to guess the state of an economy. Specifically, the current ‘value of money’ as measured by its availability and the cost of borrowing, can often indicate whether an economy is likely to be suffering [...]

I recently had the enjoyable experience of visiting Kaohsiung County at the invitation of my friends. I’ll blog further about some of the places I visited, but I wanted to share some pictures from an unusual town that specialises almost exclusively in Taro flavour icecream and crazy food. The name escapes me at the moment… [...]

Some well known bloggers pay a visit to Taoyuan…
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 [...]

The Nintendo Wii is finally about to reach Taiwan officially! (maybe)
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 [...]

Well, my first Chinese new year in Taiwan has almost arrived. Even now, two days before new year, it’s hard to ignore the noise of fireworks going off throughout the evening as the year of the Pig rapidly approaches.

Mysterious pig-themed monolith found outside the Taipei Main Station.
The new year buildup starts with having a [...]

Previously, I wrote about a quick trip I paid to Banqiao at night by mistake. I went back again the next day, on my way to Taipei, to see how the place looked during the day.

Banqiao has some reasonable green area nearby the HSR, MRT and train/bus terminals.

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 [...]

Tequila Sunrise – 42 XinSheng S. Rd., Sec 3, (02) 2362-7563, Hours: 11:30 am-2 pm/5:30 pm-10 pm. Near Gongguan MRT station.
If you felt like eating Mexican food, Taipei might perhaps not be the first place in the world you’d pick to dine. And rightly so, this meal would unfortunately seem to indicate – [...]