Haaretz, the best Israeli newspaper, has an excellent article on Taiwan. Dror Mishani, Haaretz’s reporter, has been invited to Taiwan to explore some the Taiwanese culture and look into some of the connections between Taiwan and Israel.
It’s a long fascinating article, but for the time being I’ll focus on one surprising section regarding the reporter’s visit to Tainan, where I - probably the only Israeli in the area - am living and studying. Here’s my very quick translation from Hebrew to English (photo by Dror Mishani) :

(Caption writes - "Priest Joe - in the center - and his family at …

One of my absolute all-time favorite movies is "Lost in Translation". There’s this one scene in which Bob can’t fall asleep and so he opens the TV and looks for something to watch, only to find a bunch the most bizarre TV shows.
After a few sleepless nights and pointless zip-zapping, I give you… Lost in Translation - Taiwanese TV :
Teen soap-opera?

Animation
This one is some cartoon of a baby in a grown up world that our Chinese teacher showed us in class to try and follow the Chinese. Funny?!

Chinese Opera?

Tons and tons of fooling around …

Tainan’s hosting the International Chihsi Arts Festival for the Qixi Chinese lovers day:

The "2007 Tainan International Chihsi Arts Festival－The Coming-of-Age16 Celebration" will be hosted by Tainan City Government from 10th of August for 10 days at the Confucius Temple and various surrounding sites in Tainan City. Through this festival, the city government aims at preserving the unique cultural heritage of "Coming of Age 16 Celebration", promoting international cultural exchanges, and enhancing the tourism of the city.

Hanjie’s Blog has done an unbelievable job in translating all the events and putting them down on a Google map for us clueless foreigners to find our way …

Another weekend to be spent indoors as the 3rd typhoon hits Taiwan in less than 10 days. This one, Sepat, is the biggest of them yet, and having seen what a small typhoon does to the sewer systems and infrastructure here in Tainan, I just can’t wait to see how this one turns out.

Aside from the obvious implications of a typhoon, I can’t even begin to describe how badly these typhoons and the general burning hot weather affects my well-being. That’s even something that’s hard  to overcome when the weather does become slightly better. I sometimes feel like a zombie, being somewhat sleep deprived, …

Our Chinese teacher, AKA "KTV queen", took our small Chinese class out yesterday to a KTV in the NCKU area.

Karaoke Box is a variant of karaoke that is popular in East Asia. It features a small to medium-sized private room containing karaoke equipment for a group of friends to rent in timed increments. A monitor in the room displays lyrics atop a themed music video. The music videos are often not the official videos, but are videos made especially for karaoke establishments. A typical Karaoke Box establishment contains 10-20 such rooms as well as a main "karaoke bar" area in the front. Karaoke Box centers can scale to hundreds of rooms and can be extremely opulent. Karaoke Box establishments often sell …

Tong Hua by Guang Liang (Fairy-tale 童话 by Michael Wong 光良) is an unbelievably popular song among basic Chinese class teachers and students. It was there in all the Chinese schools I attended, and it’s quite obvious why - it’s easy to understand, it’s simple to follow, it’s touching and melodic. The NCKU Chinese Language school has been holding a KTV Karaoke competition this past week among the Chinese language students. Surprisingly, I knew some of the songs there, but - among others - there was Michael Wong’s Tonghua once again. So, here’s a chance to compare the Chinese language students of the NCKU Chinese Language center in Tainan-Taiwan to the Hebrew University East Asia department in Jerusalem-Israel : NCKU Language School KTV contest: …