Fili’s world

With the "Help Fili eat… better" Taiwanese-Chinese food project going a lot better than I expected, I thought it was time to introduce a little of the Taiwanese culture with writing something about some of the really great Taiwanese food I find here in Taiwan. But, in the past few days, the project has also [...]

No, I’m not starving…  I just find it extremely difficult to find the really good dishes around the huge Taiwanese menus in Chinese they hand me at the local restaurants. So, tonight, after receiving yet another mistake-surprise I figured I need some help and after contemplating this problem I thought that I can actually ask for help. [...]

I love the Japanese. Yeah, why not, I’ll generalize. Japanese pop-culture is everywhere in Asia, even in countries that have some emotional conflicts with the Japanese. With some odd and cute peculiarities it’s quite obvious that Japanese have a different take on things, in a cool sort of way. It seems that they’ve truly developed one [...]

I thought people were joking around when they told me that the 08/08 of every year is the ba-ba day, or father’s day ("eight-eight" or "dad" in Chinese - 爸爸節 or 父親節). Strange… we never have "Father’s day" in Israel. We used to have mother’s day till a few politically correct politicians declared it "family day", which made [...]

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It has been over one semester since I last touched Chinese and over a year since I last had a decent Chinese class (no, Chinese classes in Israel don’t count). Honest to god, I can hardly manage anything in Chinese. I know that I know things, I can [...]

Taiwan’s got a military model that’s very similar to Israel’s and that’s an issue that comes up very often when the Taiwanese learn that I’m Israeli and try to compare Israel and Taiwan. Both countries are of the same size, more or less the same economic strength, and are faced by generally similar threats from [...]