Hey there friends, It’s about time you had a word from me. I’m writing you from a hotel room in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second-largest city, where I’ll be playing later this evening, mid-way through a two-week round-the-island tour. I’ve just come down from three days spent alone motorbiking through the
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Editorial / The Wild East Foreigners teaching in Taiwan’s ‘buxibans’, or cram schools are finding an increasingly tough job market, with sharply reductions in hourly and monthly wages, fewer teacher openings, and competition with an influx of new graduates entering the stagnant, saturated world of English teaching in Taiwan. In
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By Rebecca Kehl You know those days when the power goes out and your fridge stops working and waters dripping from the freezer and there’s no air-con and it’s like 35°C? And you try to plug in your computer cuz it’s low on battery. You need to send that paper in
Read moreThe Wild East / Culture Shock Why am I suing my landlady? Out of principle, basically. She broke the law, and therefore needs to be taught a lesson so she doesn’t do it again. I reported my Taiwanese landlady, ‘Helen’ Lin, to the Tamsui police station a few months ago,
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Well, as we know, the world doesn’t revolve around the Sun anymore. Instead, we’ve got excess(ive) plastic packaging, unreused plastic bags, plastic straws, and the best of them all in Taiwan, the plastic cup! Of which each typically has 1 life. Many have heard of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, AKA Plastic Island,
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It has generated great publicity for Bon Jovi’s upcoming Asian tour, and a fierce debate between Chinese speakers on both sides of the strait. At the time of writing, the song has enjoyed more than 1.2 million views, 11,462 likes, and over one thousand comments on youtube. One point of
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T The Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society is holding a FEPOW Day (Far East Prisoners of War) event this coming Saturday evening August 15th at 5:30 pm. at the Spot Theatre – 18, Zhongshan North Road Sec. 2 in downtown Taipei. At this time there is still plenty of space
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By Trista di Genova, The Wild East / Editorial The Taiwanese fare abysmally in international English scores. Why? Part of the reason could be attributed to the difficulty of learning such a vastly different language. According to the US State Department, Mandarin is one of the world’s most difficult languages for
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Confirm attendance on <a href=”https://www.facebook.com/events/1672052289683562/“>Facebook</a> We welcome you to join us for a nourishing day of yoga and transformational Bio Behavioral activities to help you resolve negative habits and thought patterns. In this half day workshop, we have a professional psychologist to guide us in making mental and behavioural changes
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BY ROSS KENNEGER / The Wild East / Opinion Working for Xinmin Private Elementary school in Taipei this year was a head-shaking, riveting experience. I’m writing this piece to talk about the chaos I’ve observed in the modern Taiwanese classroom, and to offer other foreign teachers some advice here in
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