We were coming out of my aunt and uncle’s apartment in Taipei, when we heard Für Elise wafting out of a narrow alley.

Despite it being dark and 9pm, people streamed towards the source of the noise — a large green truck. The men hanging off the back of the truck cheerfully grabbed the bags off my aunt and uncle’s neighbours and tossed them into the back.

‘What’s that?’ we asked.

‘That’s how rubbish is collected,’ my cousin said. ‘When you hear the music, you bring your rubbish and recycling out.’

In the city of Tainan, we ran into a late night convoy of three trucks playing Greensleeves, with the words ‘Voted best garbage truck 2012’ emblazoned on the sides.

You can read about these trucks and see videos on the Mother Nature Network. The Taipei Times also reports:

‘When the first garbage trucks to be incorporated into the scheme took the streets of Tainan on Monday, the dulcet tones of “How are you?” and “I’m fine. Thank you” sounded the beginning of the nation’s — if not the world’s — first foreign language-teaching trash collection program…

“We plan to have at least 24 trucks running the English lessons in October,” Hsieh said. “And of course, if it continues to prove popular this number could increase and eventually include all the city’s garbage trucks.”

‘To prove how easy it is for residents with no previous knowledge of the English language to learn the simple phrases, Tainan’s mayor held an impromptu examination on Tuesday. The test was hailed a huge success, with six garbage truck workers being sent to the top of the class after replying to the mayor’s “How are you?” in heavily accented, but correct English.’

I’m sad that I wasn’t quick enough to take photos of any of the musical rubbish trucks. As consolation, here are some other odd things we saw in Taiwan.

Aaron and I were in Shanghai for a work project. One evening, we went in search of cheap electronic goods at a shopping centre that one of our colleagues recommended.

Sadly, pirated software and unbranded hardware seems to be a thing of the Shanghai past. Everything we saw was the real deal, as genuine as anything on Bourke Street Mall.

‘No discount.’ they said as we clumsily tried to haggle. ‘Real Apple. Same price everywhere.’

We quickly gave up our search for an Apple-compatible VGA cable. Instead, we found ourselves in a China-scale bookstore. It was as big as a small department store in Melbourne, and at 9pm was full of people reading.

‘Hello!’ someone said as I walked past a display of translated Barack Obama biographies.

‘Hello,’ I replied, keen to practice my Chinese.

‘Do you want to learn English?’

‘Um…’

‘Here! You can have English lessons,’ he said, trying to hand me a brochure. ‘Free lessons.’

‘Ah! I marshalled my thoughts to explain. ‘I grew up in Australia. My English is… much better than Chinese!’

The fellow looked confused and then left us alone. I think he got the message.

Later, I got two more chances to practice the same conversation with bookstore staff positioned deeper into the store.

I love forms. There’s just something about boxes. Seven years ago, I was crushed by missing out on Australia’s 2006 census. My disappointment was finally wiped by my participation as Person 1 in the 2011 census.

So you’ll understand my joy when on a work trip in New Zealand, I found these forms tucked under the door of my hotel room.

You may be thinking, ‘That’s ridiculous. How many people in the hotel are actually going to fill in the form?’

I’ll have you know that the next morning, I walked into the lift and there were two other people. All three of us had the white census envelope, ready to give to the reception staff.

Jess and Jared took us to the TreeTop Adventure Park, about an 75 minutes out of Sydney. The Park has high ropes courses, graded from Yellow to Black, much like the difficulty grades for ski runs.

We started at Green (the first ‘easy’ adult course) and aimed to get to black.

Blue was okay with a bit of wobbling, a bit of effort.

Red started getting quite hard. At one part of the course, I grabbed a rope and swung Tarzan-style from tree to tree. At the arrival end, I had to let go of the rope and throw myself at a rope net. It was hard, pulling myself up the net to the next platform. The net kept moving because it was not anchored at the bottom. Damjan had to coax me up, every net square of the way.

At the end of the red course, Jess said to us, ‘I just spoke to the man ahead of us. He’s done the black one before and he says he finds it quite hard.’

This is true. I think the black TreeTop Adventure course was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life.

At the beginning, I almost made it over a long flying fox but I landed just a bit too slowly and didn’t get onto the platform. Instead, I zoomed backwards to the centre of the rope. Using my arms, I had to pull myself backwards toward the platform.

As I came to the next challenge, Jess yelled out to warn us that the moving platform here would slide back as soon as I let go of it at the other end, so I would have to leap onto the other tree as quickly as I could.

By this time, I had no strength left in my arms. A few times, I couldn’t keep the platform beneath me and it slid away behind me as I clung to wire ropes. As I inched close to the end, Damjan grabbed me and dragged me to safety. I burst into tears and thought very seriously about calling for management help to get me down from the trees NOW.

Forging onwards, there were unstable ladders to climb up, swinging footholds, monkey bars… For one challenge, there was a wooden plank suspended between two trees. We worked out that we had to use it as a ‘half bridge’. We inched over it to the centre, then used our feet to swing (like surfing) the half bridge over to the other tree to complete the crossing.

The man doing the course behind me walked the plank to the centre of the gap before the plank slipped off the first tree. He hung in mid-air, the plank dangling beside him.

‘Is this supposed to happen?’ he called plaintively. ‘What do I do now?’

With no options, he dragged himself to the other side using the guide rope.

I kept thinking the course was almost over but it was obstacle after obstacle.

At the end of it all, I was so relieved. I think I accomplished something but… all I think about, really, is how bloody hard it was.

I saw this at the Sydney Botanic Gardens.

Some tourists came up beside me and talked puzzedly amongst themselves. They eventually figured out it was a collar to prevent possums from climbing up the tree.