A Taiwanese man sparked controversy on social media after complaining about getting a pay cut for spending too much time in the bathroom during work hours.

The disgruntled employee, identified only as ‘Mr. A.’, recently took to Facebook to voice his frustration and disappointment at having part of his monthly salary withheld by the company he works at, for having spent too much time in the bathroom the previous month. The man admitted to spending a whopping 49.5 hours in the toilet, which amounts to about two hours of bathroom time per day, but said that his employer failed to inform him that his wages could be cut for taking too long toilet breaks.

The Taiwanese man posted his story on the Blame 2 Commune Facebook Group, asking the other member for advice on how to proceed. He clarified that he had worked 22 days as an intern last month, for a total of 195 hours and an hourly salary of 160 yuan. However, on pay day, he noticed than about 4,400 yuan had been deducted, so he decided to take up the matter with human resources.

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A man who accidentally lost his iPhone 11 while paddling on a lake in March of last year recently posted photos of the handheld miraculously retrieved from the bottom of the lake after more than a year. The handheld was in need of a recharge, but otherwise worked perfectly!

The owner of the iPhone, a Taiwanese man named Chen Yj, recently took to a public Facebook group to tell the amazing story of how his handheld survived a year underwater. Writing on the Bangfu1 Commune Facebook group, Chen said that he lost his iPhone 11 in March of 2020, while paddling on Sun Moon Lake, in Taiwan. Photos shared on the public group show him wearing an orange vest, with the Apple handheld around his neck. At one point, the man falls off his board, and the phone can be seen sinking to the bottom of the lake. Little did Chen know that he would not only retrieve his phone a year later, but it would be in perfect working condition.

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A popular Taiwanese streamer recently sparked controversy on Asian social media, after earning around $3,000 by simply streaming herself sleeping for five hours to thousands of her fans.

Wang Yiming, a former member of Chinese-Malaysian pop group AMOi-AMOi, joined Twitch late last year, soon after her music group disbanded, and quickly became one of the most popular Twitch streamers in Taiwan. She usually plays video games and chats with her fans, but yesterday evening, she decided to try something new. She logged into her Twitch account at around 5pm, but instead of her usual desk, fans were treated to Yiming’s bed, which she proceeded to lie on and go to sleep until about 10pm. During that time, she managed to attract tens of thousands of viewers, with a peak of 11,200 concurrent viewers.

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Touching your girlfriend isn’t generally considered a punishable offence, but things change considerably when your date for the day is a rental.

A Taiwanese university student learned that the hard way, after getting a bit too close to a girlfriends he had rented by the hour, and getting sentenced to jail for it. In July of 2019, the boy, identified only as ‘Chen’, paid 7,200 Taiwanese dollars ($260) to rent a girlfriend for three hours, from a company called “Love Acting-Extra”. The service had very specific rules detailing what the client was allowed to to with his rented girlfriend, but also what was forbidden. Unfortunately for Chen, he got carried away, and paid a steep price for it…

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Taipei’s Songshan Airport recently launched a unique “fake flight” service that gives melancholic travelers the chance to go through the check-in and plane boarding procedures without actually taking off.

Ever since Taiwan closed off its borders in mid-March, travelers have been forced to dream and reminisce about their past adventures in foreign lands, but on July 2nd, the Songshan Airport in Taipei introduced an offbeat service that gives people the full airport experience without the actual takeoff. The new fake flight service includes airport security checks, passport verification, the full check-in procedure, as well the boarding of an Airbus A330 airplane. Cabin crew give passengers the usual instructions as well as some relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, and serve them snacks and coffee, before preparing them for the fake landing.

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A Taiwanese pensioner who once made international headlines for strapping almost a dozen smartphones to his bicycle so he could catch multiple Pokemon in Pokemon GO! faster has now taken his passion for the mobile game to new heights, with a whopping 64 phones attached to his bike.

We originally featured Chen Sanyuan in August of 2018, shortly after photos of him taken by passers-by in Taipei City had gone viral. It was easy to see why photos of the then 70-year-old were getting so much attention – here was this old man riding his bicycle around town with multiple smartphones hooked on to the handlebars. After  reaching the front page of Reddit, Chen was approached by Taiwanese gaming website EXP.GG and he explained that he had come up with the bizarre setup so he could operate multiple Pokemon GO accounts at the same time. He had fallen in love with Niantic’s hit game after being introduced to it by his grandson, and now couldn’t get enough.

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A small food stall chain in Taiwan has been raising eyebrows due to the shape of its pancake pops. Instead of the usual round design their delicious creations are shaped like whole roasted chickens.

Walking past a YesMade food stall, you’d think it was selling miniature rotisserie chickens, but the Taiwanese fast food chain actually specializes in pancake pops. They are made from the same batter as regular pancakes, but they just happen to look like perfectly roasted chickens. YesMade achieves this illusion thanks to their custom-made pancake iron, which features small chicken-shaped molds. As you can imagine, the unique shape of their delicious creations has made YesMade a huge hit on Instagram.

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In a medical case that doctors have called a “world’s first”, a Taiwanese woman was found to have four live sweat bees living in her eye, feeding on her tears.

The patient, referred to only as Ms. He, was reportedly tidying up a relative’s grave at the cemetery by pulling out weeds when a gust of wind blew what she though was sand and dirt into her eye. She cleaned her eyes with water, but a few hours later she started feeling a sharp pain in her left eye and started constantly tearing up. The 20-something woman was taken to Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan’s southern county of Pingtung , where ophthalmologists were shocked to find four live sweat bees feeding on her eye like it was a salt lick.

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A 59-year-old man from Taiwan has become an internet meme thanks to his ridiculously square hairdo that makes him look like a real-life Minecraft character.

Wu Goren first made news headlines back in 2014, when photos of his bizarre square hairdo went viral on social media. Taiwanese news channels quickly tracked down the middle-aged man and questioned him about his unique hairdo. As it turns out, Wu, who works as a medical scientist at National Taiwan University Hospital, adopted the look after being rejected by a woman, as a way of making himself look like a man in his 20s or 30s. It’s unclear how he came to the conclusion that square hair makes someone look younger, but there’s no denying that it is eye-catching.

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Police in the Taiwanese city of Taipei were accused of wasting taxpayers’ money on solving stupid cases, after local media revealed that they recently conducted DNA tests worth hundreds of dollars to find out who drank a student’s $2 yogurt bottle.

Sharing a fridge with roommates in college usually means accepting that, from time to time, some of your treats will mysteriously disappear. It’s like a tradition, but for one Taiwanese woman sharing a house with five other women studying at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, it was a serious crime that had to be solved at any cost. Last month, the unnamed woman came home to find one of her yogurt bottles empty in the garbage bin. None of her housemates had asked her permission to drink the yogurt, so she fished the empty bottle from the trash, convened an emergency house meeting and asked the other five women which one of them had stolen her yogurt. When none of them owned up to the crime, the infuriated woman took the empty yogurt bottle to the police and demanded that they carry out an official investigation and bring the criminal to justice.

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For the past seven years, a family from Taiwan’s Chiayi county had only been able to access their kitchen with rubber boots on or risk getting electrocuted. Even turning on the faucet with their bare hands was a risky affair as current could be running through it.

The man of the house, known only as Mr. He, was recently featured in a short news segment on the bizarre phenomenon affecting his household. Seeing him getting ready to enter his kitchen, one would assume that he’s dealing with a flooded room, but in fact the rubber boots he always puts on are supposed to protect him from the electricity running through the kitchen. Every time he touches the metal walls of the kitchen, or even the water faucet with his bare hand, He claims to get an electrical shock. To avoid that, he always operates the faucet with a soup spoon equipped with a wooden handle.

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Pokemon GO may not be the phenomenon it was a couple of years ago, when virtually everyone was playing it, but the mobile game still has its share of die-hard fans. And 70-year-old Chen Sanyuan may just be the world’s most dedicated Pokemon GO player.

If you’ve checked out the Pokemon GO subreddit over the last couple of months, you may be familiar with the “hardcore pokemon hunter grandpa” from Taipei City, in Taiwan. Photos of him riding his customized pokemon-hunting bicycle have been doing the rounds on Reddit for a while, and every time a new one is posted, the bike appears to be getting crazier. Well, it’s not just appearances, Chen Sanyuan, the 70-year-old pokemon hunter is upgrading his bicycle every chance he gets. He currently has a whopping 9 smartphones – all connected to different Pokemon Go accounts – installed on the handlebar, as well as 9 power banks stored in a small basket, which allow him to hunt pokemons for around 20 hours at a time. Now that’s dedication!

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A cafe in Taiwan has been getting a lot of attention online for serving puppy-shaped ice-cream that most people describe as adorable and terrifying at the same time.

When you think about food, the first thing that probably comes to mind is taste, but the fact is that eating is a visual experience as well, and sometimes you can be put off by a dish, even though you know it is delicious. That’s kind of the vibe I’m getting from the puppy-shaped ice-cream served at the Sowing the Sweets cafe, in Taiwan. I’m sure it tastes good – it’s ice-cream, after all – but at the same time I find the idea of digging into this realistic puppy with a spoon disturbing and morbid.

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Every year, more than a million pigeons die while competing in Taiwan’s controversial pigeon sea races, a series of grueling events in which young birds are shipped far out to sea, released in the middle of nowhere and forced to fly home. According to several reports from animal rights organizations, less than 1% of them make it back to land.

The small island of Taiwan hosts more pigeon racing events than any other country in the world. A reported 500,000 Taiwanese race pigeons every year, competing for billions of New Taiwan dollars in prize money. Pigeon racing is such a big business that the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology once introduced an optional course on it, which proved very popular with both young and old pigeon racers. However, important notions taught during this course, like injury prevention and the use of performance enhancing drugs fly out the window during Taiwan’s seasonal sea races.

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A female candidate for a local position in Taipei, Taiwan, recently became the butt of social media jokes, after people noticed that she looked nothing like the woman on her campaign posters.

The world of politics is no stranger to image editing software, as many politicians turn to programs like Photoshop to make themselves look better in campaign posters. However, PR people sometimes overdo it to the point where the editing is obvious even to the untrained eye. And then there are cases like that of Wang Zhiya, a politician running for a position on Taipei’s City Council, whose campaign posters look absolutely nothing like her.

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