Lasting two years in the highly competitive bar and club scene is a rare achievement in Taiwan. Ryan Fernandez and Graham Dart opened their live music venue, Brickyard, two years ago, and it has been going strong ever since. Tomorrow night, Brickyard celebrates its two-year anniversary.
One of the reasons for Brickyard’s longevity is growth. Towards the end of the summer, the venue expanded by opening up a beer garden, where live music permeates the air on Wednesday and Saturday nights, two blocks away from the bar.
“The expansion has been great. We have Bitburger and Taiwan beer on tap,” Fernandez said. “After spending so long in a basement, it’s really, really nice to sit in a park with a cold beer and listen to some good music.”
Photo courtesy of Danny Chu
Another way a bar stays popular is by evolving. “We had an impromptu dance circle break out during our regular Wednesday ladies’ night about six months ago,” said Fernandez. “It was so awesome we started contacting dancers and offering prize money.”
While both Dart and Fernandez have worked hard to be successful, Dart doesn’t believe that there is a strict formula.
“If there is a key to success in this city, Ryan and I would like one copy each,” Dart said. “We will then close Brickyard and sell copies of these keys all over the city.”
Two Year Anniversary at Brickyard, B1, 507 Jhongshan 2nd Rd, Cianjin Dist, Greater Kaohsiung (高雄市前金區中山二路507號B1). Admission is free before 1am. Entry is NT$150 for girls and NT$300 for guys after 1am, which includes a drink.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
RSS