#13 Life in Taiwan

While staying in Taiwan for the past few weeks, I like the place and love the people. I decided to post this to talk about life in Taiwan. It’s about different things such as; people, culture, buildings, transportation and of course scooters 🙂

The people of Taiwan as I mentioned in previous posts are amazingly very friendly. They are always willing to help and offer assistance, I had some occasions where I was looking at a map and find people approached me to ask me if I need help with direction. Sometimes I get some people staring at me, not in a bad way; I think it’s more because I am not Asian so they’re kind of curious, and I think because I am too hairy, it scares them 🙂
I noticed I get these stares more often in little towns and from older people or very young kids. I was told just like for most of us we cannot distinguish between the different types of Asian people; it’s the same thing for Asians, they cannot distinguish between different types of other races, they have a term for us in Taiwan “Atowa”, which is slang for anyone not Asian.

I also noticed that people especially women carry an umbrella because they don’t want to get their skin tanned, you can see in commercials and magazine ads in where they make the girls look very white. It’s also common cosmetic procedure to have the skin toned to look whiter and they sell creams to whiter the skin. It’s funny that one time I was at the beach and I saw some girls sitting by the beach but carrying umbrellas, in a way they want to enjoy being at the beach but they don’t want to get suntanned. As I said it’s more common among women but you also see some men carrying umbrellas.

Once you visit Taiwan you cannot ignore the abundance of scooters, they are every where. As I mentioned before they are used for everything, from going to work, to transport a whole family or to transport big objects. It’s very dangerous the way people drive scooters here. You need to watch out all the time. Because drive them on sidewalks, on the streets and they don’t seem to follow the rules of traffic. Everyone has a scooter, I was told that even people who own cars have scooter, so they use it when they don’t use their cars. You see professionals who’re going to work dressed professionally going to work on a scooter and when they get off work they stop to get a take-out meal for their family or for themselves.
Bicycles are also in big numbers but they tend to be more among youngsters like students. You will see a lot of them inside universities campuses. And just like in Bixi bicycles in Montreal or velolib in Paris where you can rent a bicycle on the street they have a similar thing. You can also get the bicycle on along which you on the train.

Speaking of the trains; the train system is the most impressive thing in Taiwan. You have the high speed train which goes up to a maximum speed of 350KM/hour which connects the whole country. The ride in these trains is very comfortable and smoother than an airplane.
There’s also the light train or as they call it MRT (Mass Rapid Train) which’s a system for daily use, it’s similar to the subway system in Toronto or New York. It’s a very efficient system, I heard that since they build it the traffic jams have dropped significantly. I noticed some of these trains are driverless and they’re made by a Canadian company – Bombardier. It’s interesting that a Canadian company will build an advanced and modern train system like this one here in Taiwan while in Canada we have a very old system.