Top Asian Cities for Expats

It would appear that Taipei only ranks 7th on the list of best Asian cities for expatriate life. The ranking is as follows:

1. Singapore
2. Tokyo
3. Hong Kong
4. Macau
5. Kuala Lumpur
6. Bandar Seri Begawan
7. Taipei
8. Bangkok
9. Seoul
10. Beijing

Click here to read the report. Notice Shanghai, the city to which so many Taiwanese are migrating is not even on the list! It figures considering that the definition of expatriate assumes English as native tongue and hence a primary factors in determining livability.

However, I don't doubt that Dhaka is indeed the least livable city. (Sorry Sol, although I thoroughly enjoyed Dhaka, I wouldn't want to live there). I think the fact that you can't stay connected to the Internet long enough to send even a short message or be sure the phone is ringing at the other end is a big factor.

The Ubyssey, a sky-blue pink thinking robe, and the purple love cow

And here's another clickable article.

Have you ever heard of the Purple Love Cow? If so, then I am proud. In 1982, a new student at Qualicum Beach Junior High School, I had very few friends in my new school and used to travel to Nanaimo to hang out with old friend Y. Ipsalalexi. She and I were both from the East Coast (Newfoundland and Newe Brunswich respectively) and found some things on Vancouver Island quite funny - like the idea that people actually went cow tipping. So we invented a different game: the search for the Purple Love Cow. Of course we never searched for it ourselves, but rather tried to get others to believe in it... and search for it. (Why purple you ask? Well, it sounded shorter and more believable than the Sky-blue Pink Love Cow which is what I might have been inclined to call it).

The expression sky-blue-pink appears in the first collection of Uncle Wiggily stories, Sammie and Susie Littletail, published in 1910, in which one young rabbit suffers a misfortune: “He splashed around and scattered the skilligimink color all over the kitchen, and when his mamma and Susie fished him out, if he wasn’t dyed the most beautiful sky-blue-pink you ever saw!”

Anyway, it seems this cow travelled to different places with us. I lived in Ottawa, where there is now a bar with a drink on the menu called Purple Love Cow (although I don't recommend it - it being rather a nasty mottled red, blue and purple, tasting sickly sweet and containing a couple of those maraschino cherries that get recycled again and again).

After a couple of years in Ontario (1990), I transferred back West and ended up running into Y. Ipsaralexi on Commercial Street (well, either there or on UBC's campus) and was reminded to not abandon my quest to get people engaged in the search for the Purple Love Cow. Today (2005), while idly spending time on the web, I actually stumbled on my name in a short article by someone recounting a meeting of the University paper's staff which I apparently missed... but in which the Purple Love Cow was also mentioned.

Miss Lam, it appears I must have had at least one conversation with your friend Miss F.

Shuma - Singing Camel

Click on image to read full article.

Ten days ago, my coworker and I arrived at my house at 4:00am after a marathon of late nights/early mornings in the office and flipped open the Taipei Times to find this article: Vice president moved to tears by 'Shuma the Singing Camel.' Perhaps you were also lucky enough to read of the world-famous SHUMA, one of a group of "female Arab racing camels that have been trained to perform." The article covered half a page and featured a quote by Taiwanese vice president Lu.

I was amazed to hear a camel sing and after the initial surprise the performance moved me to tears. I will certainly be attending the show with our visitors from Egypt.

As we read, the contents were more and more amazing:

For the upcoming show, one camel has been trained for over a year to chant The Grand old Duke of York, while punctuating the nursery rhyme with flatulent blasts that are said to resemble the sound of a bass drum, or cannon exploding.

This was no more incredible than the fact that Shuma and her gang had also purportedly learned a few ballroom dance steps, could dance hip hop and planned to end the recital with a "stirring version of Georg Friedrich Handel's Messiah". At 4 in the morning, we had no choice in our state of incredulous disbelief, but to go online to search for Shuma.

The weekend following the article, we had occasion to have lunch with someone from our Hong Kong office and the story of Shuma the Singing Camel camel up. "Ha ha! What a great April Fool's joke," she said immediately without even a suggestion of hesitation. (We sort of had thought that, too... but it was just too long, too detialed, too bizarre... We are still waiting for the story to have been taken up by another paper... or for the Taipei Times to make mention of the "fools" who showed up at the Chiang Hai Shek Memorial Hall or wrote in for free tickets. (Thank God we weren't among them.)