Taiwan's English learning industry is HUGE. Go to any decent sized bookshop, and you'll see racks and racks filled with all kinds of English learning magazines. Most are accompanied with audio CDs and some even have DVDs. A friend of mine works for an English learning publishing company and managed to organise me a job being filmed lip syncing English dialogues with another foreigner, who you can see here. Hope she doesn't mind me posting this!

Here's a cliche'd photo of Taiwan. Rice paddy in the foreground and modern city buildings behind it.

And here are 2 of Taiwan's most famous mucicians, the lead singer for a band called 'Mayday' on the left and 'OO Bai' (which means 500). From what I can tell, OO Bai is kindof the Bono of Taiwan, with his shades and attitude. Corrections welcome!

I went to the 'Tai Kuh' Rock Festival/Concert thing the other day with a friend. It was an awesome experience to see some of the biggest names in Taiwanese music all playing one after another. There were about 30000 people there but they were all amazingly chilled and well behaved, and I didn't spot a single drunk person. Not one. Weird, by western standards, but I really like it. Actually, Taiwanese people are pretty mature and self controlled in general and know how to behave in a crowd. The band playing here is 'Wung Fu', who play kindof 60's/70's style rock with a Taiwanese flavour. They have an unusual dorky sound but are excellent musicians. Good enough for me to have one of their CDs.

Hin Tsong Ming! That means 'so smart' in Mandarin and it's what I thought about Taiwanese people when I saw the local city government using a forklift to pick up cars while they repainted the parking bay lines. I was a bit worried about the forklift tipping over though... I guess this also makes you less confident in the effectiveness of all those mail order steering locks!

I'm in Taiwan so I can post as many red black and white pictures as I want, even if they look mostly the same! This one was taken in the garden of my aparment complex during some light rain.