It got off to a slow start, but a long-awaited travel agreement between China and Taiwan, forged last summer, has finally yielded a huge bump in mainland tourists traveling to the island.

My great affection for the Taiwanese notwithstanding, sometimes I’m just plain baffled by the trends that take hold on the island. Case in point: toilet-themed restaurants. Yes, a chain called Modern Toilet now has nine outposts in Taiwan, and is apparently a hit among teens and college students. GlobalPost describes the fad this way:

“Here, customers sit on toilets and eat on covered washbasins. The most popular dishes are chocolate ice cream or curry chicken, served in a mini-toilet. Why? ‘It looks like poo-poo,’ explained Jary Wei, assistant manager at the chain’s Taipei branch. ‘The customers think it’s funny.’”

Charming.

Airplane, prison and hospital-themed restaurants have also caught on in Taiwan—more evidence that the island takes its cultural cues from Japan, which pioneered the trend—but, really, toilets?

In defense of Taiwanese college students, I’ll just say that I advised a number of them while I was living on the island and found them to be exceedingly bright and cosmopolitan. Then again, they’re under a lot of academic pressure, so maybe a visit to Modern Toilet yields some, uh, relief.

Best Beaches
– “Top 10 beaches of the world” (Guardian)

Dallas for Art Buffs
– “Bohemia in the Big D” (LA Times)

French Country Retreats
– “The best of rural France” (Times of London)

Hanoi
– “The Awakening of Hanoi” (NYT)

New Orleans Dining
– “Preparing a Renaissance” (Washington Post)

Singapore
– “Another side of Singapore” (LA Times)

Tahiti’s Tuamotus
– “The Fragile Paradise That Tahiti Used to Be” (NYT)

Taiwan
– “Fantasy Island” (SF Chronicle)

A tip of the Skipper hat to Jaunted for turning us on to Island of Sound, a website dedicated to exploring Taiwanese Indie rock. Independence is a sticky issue in Taiwan and happily musical independence is a little easier to achieve. The website features bands, obviously, we haven't heard of. Thankfully the site has quicktime samples of bands like indie popster Natural Q and punk outfits like the Deported. Also the site has a nice list of live music cafes and bars at which one can find these bands. Though a little light on the deets, Islands of Sound is a good, and perhaps the only, place for an Anglophile to delve into Taiwanese indie music.

Islands of Sound

[Photo: Islands of Sound]

Previously: Touchable Design, Fashion Notes from Taiwan

This image of Manila comes from a Forbes special on the most densely populated, congested cities on earth. With a total population of 10 million in the metropolitan area, Manila may not be the largest city on earth, but its city center squeezes a staggering 41,000 people into each square kilometer. In comparison, Mumbai, which has become virtually synonymous with urban density, has just under 30,000 people per km squared by Forbes’ reckoning, and doesn’t make the list of the most congested cities. They are, in descending order: Cairo, Lagos, Macau, Seoul, Dhaka, Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Kaohsiung and Santo Domingo. Attempt driving in any of them at your own risk.

Vlogger tburnett5 over at Current TV posted this nicely meditative pod about traveling alone on the wrong side of a language barrier.