Tag Archive for ‘Matt Gibson’
Ten Quotes About Walking
Share Today wrote a a query letter to a magazine editor about an article about different walks that a person can take in Taiwan. While looking up quotations to use in the query I suddenly remembered how much I used to enjoy walking. When I first started traveling, whenever I arrived in a new city, [...]
Check Out This Month’s Action Asia Magazine
Share Check out this month’s Action Asia magazine for my profile of one of Taiwan’s most prominent and longstanding foreign paragliding pilots, Malcom Vargas.
A Good Year for Awards (I Won Another One)
Share Damn, it’s been a good year for awards. Today I was notified that I was chosen as one of the top fifty travel blogs of 2010 ) by Awarding the Web — an organization that strives “to recognize excellent web content so that those who have worthwhile content can be distinguished from the useless, [...]
Watch it Now: Illegal Border Crossing Simulation from VBS.tv
Share The good folks at VBS.tv are, in my opinion, some of the best documentarians in the world. They go after ridiculous and unthinkable stories gonzo style, resulting in a humanistic view of incredible tragedies, and incredibly weird topics. A couple months ago I posted the riveting, and extremely disturbing, Vice Guide to Liberia. Next, [...]
Wow, Matt-Gibson.org was Just Chosen as One of the Best Travel Blogs in the World
Share I just received an email from Online Degree Programs. They ranked Matt-Gibson.org as one of the 50 best travel blogs in the world. I’m even placed third on the list (although I don’t think that really means anything), just after World Hum and Best Travel Writing, two of the biggest and best group travel [...]
Yenshuei Fireworks Festival 2010 Photo Gallery
Share The Yenshuei Fireworks Festival (Yenshuei Fong Pao) is a festival held in the Yenshuei township in Southern Taiwan every year. During the festival millions of fireworks are shot out of large hives into crowds of revelers dressed in heavy clothing and full-face motorcycle helmets. Each hive may contain as many as sixty thousand fireworks. [...]
Portfolio
Share Click a thumbnail to view a larger version of the picture. To navigate the full-size picture gallery click on the arrow icons, the picture itself, or use the arrow keys on your keyboard.
Riding the Crocodile V2.0
Share Note: This is a heavily reworked version of an article that originally appeared in Highway 11 Magazine. Don’t miss the photo gallery from the farm at the bottom of this page! I tipped back my cowboy hat, which I had brought to wave in the air while riding the crocodile, and sized up the [...]
Learning to Fly: Paragliding in Fang Liao Taiwan
Share Recently I’ve been working on a series of articles about paragliding in Taiwan. I’ve been learning how to paraglide, and about the evolution of paragliding in Taiwan, from Malcom Vargas who is, as far as I know, the only certified foreign paragliding instructor in the country. These are some photos from one of my [...]
Help Me Pick My Best Travel Photos
Share For the last few days I’ve been working on my application for the Glimpse Correspondent Program. I’ve gone through all of my old photos, picked out my favorites, and touched them up. I now have a total of thirty-three pictures. The problem is, I need to narrow my submission down to twenty. If you [...]
Matt-Gibson.org Featured on TravelPod
Share It’s nice to be noticed. A couple of weeks ago Matt-Gibson.org was TravelPod’s blog of the day. TravelPod offers free blogs to travelers who want to share their adventures with their friends online. It’s very easy to use; great for new bloggers. You can upload as many photos and videos as you want, make [...]
An Interview with Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere
Share Ranking travel blogs is a tricky business. There is no way of knowing exactly how much traffic a blog gets, and how long visitors stay for, unless you’re the administrator of the blog. There are several tools you can use to rank other peoples’ blogs, but none are completely accurate. However, whenever I read [...]
There’s Treasure Everywhere
Share When I first moved to Taiwan I was fascinated with everything. I walked around stupefied, a silly grin permanently plastered to my face, amazed at the incredible world that I had discovered. That lasted for about three years. I don’t smile like that anymore. I haven’t for quite some time. About a year-and-a-half ago [...]
Five Awesome Travel Quotes
Share In no particular order: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu “One’s destination is [...]
Standing in the Fireworks: A Trip to the Yenshuei Beehive Fireworks Festival, Taiwan
Share On Febrary 27, 2010 a Chinese New Year fireworks celebration in the Guangdong province went awry and killed 19 villagers. On February 28th, 2010 I was in Yenshuei Township in southern Taiwan facing a several hives containing tens of thousands of fireworks set to fire into the hundreds of people that were crowded around [...]
Ghosts and Angels on the Beautiful Island
Share When I woke up around nine that Sunday morning my cell phone showed that I had 33 missed calls. It rang again in my hand. It was the head teacher from the school I worked at. “We’re at the hospital.” She told me. “Jana was hit by a bus.” On the way to the [...]
Snorkeling, Rum, and Island Hopping: Five Days in Coron, Busuanga Island, Philippines
Share To escape the suffocating traffic and staccato of firecrackers that besiege Taiwan every Chinese New Year, several friends and I booked tickets on a budget carrier, Spirit of Manila, to the city of Coron on Busuanga Island in the Philippines for five days of snorkeling, island hopping, and rum drinking. The tickets were very [...]
Bunk Magazine Issue 5 is out now
Share The first issue of Bunk Magazine was published by the Armory nearly 10 years ago, long before I arrived in Taiwan. Around the time I moved to Taiwan the last issue of Bunk, issue 4, was published. Bunk had a big influence on my decision to start Xpat Magazine. It showed me that an [...]
Letter from the Editor: Bunk Magazine Issue 5
Share The Armory is synonymous with art. The Armory itself is a work of art, having been built by a sculptor from the remains of the demolished armory that once stood in its place. Since then the Armory has hosted numerous art and photography exhibitions, usually for charity, and often paid local bands to play [...]
Why I Travel
A short humorous essay by Matt Gibson about the nature of travel, independence, freedom, travel scams and chicken busses.
Music With a Message: A Brief History of Protest Music in North America
Share Scratch Magazine June, 2004 Music has long been used by the poor and oppressed to lift spirits and communicate messages of social change. From the African-American slaves of the deep south singing soulful, subtly rebellious, gospel hymns, to Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine belting out “We gotta take the power [...]
Thank You and Goodbye
Share Xpat Magazine March, 2008 I’m sitting here at my desk gazing out the window, trying to put to paper some kind of goodbye letter for my last issue behind the wheel of Xpat. But as I reflect on my time working on Xpat, and in Taiwan, I’m filled with a single emotion: gratitude. So, [...]
Change
Share Xpat Magazine September, 2007 I pen this letter from a remote stretch of shore on Kootenay Lake, an enormous, unmolested body of water hundreds of kilometers long, slung in a deep valley in British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains. As a child I spent countless summers running barefoot through these cedar forests. Today is the first [...]
The Top Twenty Bizarre English Names in Taiwan
Share Xpat Magazine June, 2007 At least once in their career, most English teachers in Taiwan stand in the unique position of naming children, or encountering a Taiwanese person, young or old, with a desire to assume an inappropriate English name. Sometimes kindie teachers, spurred by lack of sleep and unmetabolized alcohol, give kids wacky [...]
From the Desk 07.03
Share Xpat Magazine March, 2007 The definition of ‘Lookism’: discrimination against or prejudice towards others based on their appearance The average hourly earnings of men with “below-average looks” and “above-average looks” compared to the national average in North America respectively: -8.9% and +5.4% The average hourly earnings of women with “below-average looks” and “above-average looks” [...]
A Kiss from Kiki
Share Published under the pseudonym Salvatore Paradisio Xpat Magazine March, 2007 “…there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and not try to hold on [...]
I'm a travel writer and photographer currently based in Tainan, Taiwan where I founded and edited Xpat Magazine, one of Taiwan's largest and longest-running expatriate periodicals. My writing and photography has been published in various print and online publications including Taiwan Today, the Taiwan Fun Magazine Group, and TransitionsAbroad.com. I speak English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese (to varying degrees) and am available for assignment. I can be reached through the form on the contact page of this website, or at xpatmatt (at) gmail.com.
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