
“Freeze the balls off a brass monkey”.
A common expression in Australia for cold weather talk-comments.
A real ‘brass monkey’ dates back to cannons and balls on war ships.
The brass plate fixed to the timber deck, held a stack of canon balls, ready for use. The brass plate was the ‘monkey or brass monkey’.
In cold weather something froze. Maybe the cannon balls when covered with ice would fall off their stack? Freeze the (cannon) balls off a brass monkey.
Nothing to do with real monkey’s and their private parts, we teenagers imagined.
The Brass Monkey bar in Taipei attracts westerners. I went there once.
There’s western food restaurants nearby, as you would expect.
I found a good Italian place for a vegetarian spaghetti. Returning some weeks later for a repeat I found the tomato sauce far-too sweet.
That’s the way it goes with restaurants, except, such as, McDonald’s where the quality stays much the same.
Another place mentioned earlier (on this blog) was Carnegie’s which is a sort of Hard Rock Cafe featuring music memorabilia.
The first thing to notice in these places is the huge body size of most westerners, as compared with locals.
Many American men would be hard to fit into most clothes commonly for sale, even local size XXL would not be large enough.