fathomTAIWAN

“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.

A guy on Australian breakfast radio yesterday was saying how the popularity of Halloween has increased greatly over the past 15 years. (ABC radio national). He has a company that hopes to sell 200,000 specially grown and partly hollow, different variety, pumpkins for Halloween (av. $10 to $20 each).

There are five or more toy shops in Taipei around my hotel, so I see them every day, doing apparently good business. Located almost next-door to each other, in typical Chinese shop fashion, it gives the customer easy choice decisions. Families with little kids are buying costumes. These are just a few items at the front doors.

November 1, and the eight shops were now featuring Christmas decorations for sale.

The street around ChangAn Road West and  Tai Yuan Road has eight small shops close to each other selling these items.  There’s also a couple of good toy shops, especially one in ChangAn Road that has miniature items.

It’s an equal distance from Taipei Main Station or Zhongshan MRT station to this area.

Broadband optical fibre to NODE boxes makes sense in densely populated areas with masses of copper wires to every apartment. The range of a NODE box is only 100 meters in Taiwan. For Australia it’s a toss-up that this system would be practical.

Decades ago communist literature was banned in Taiwan so I guess something like these novelty bags for sale in the Taipei underground city mall, would have the shopkeeper in a bit of bother if  on sale until maybe the late 1980s.