Hell's Kitchen Cont'd

Taipei

Behold. These are the images of my in-law's kitchen in Taipei:

And honestly, what more can I say? My mother in law is perfectly content with her kitchen. If you ask her if there's anything wrong with her kitchen's setup, she'll be completely forthcoming and tell you that there's nothing that should change. No irrationally there...

If I offer to clean up, my mother in law will get upset. I can understand that - we all want our personal space. If I offer to buy an organizer, she will get upset - why waste the money? The irony of it all is that the floor throughout the house is completely spotless. There's not a spec of dust on the white linoleum floors.

More Random Thoughts During My Last Day in Taiwan

• Green tomatoes not only are edible, they're tasty! They won't give you food poisoning because they were genetically created to remain partially green, or so I'm told.
• If you hear a lot of courtesy flushes coming from the bathroom, you know there's an American in there. As I've mentioned before, most toilets in this country will clog if a bunch of toilet paper is flushed at once. You are left with two options: either throw your dirty toilet paper into a one-gallon trash can located in nearly every bathroom here, or flush a small amount of toilet paper at a time (hence the five courtesy flushes by Americans refusing to change their ways - thank goodness)
• Beginning April 1st, chicken's blood no longer will be shed iin front of everyone shopping at the day market. It is now safe for Chick-Fil-A to introduce their Taiwanese fried chicken and dominate the market.
• I'm going to miss having great sashimi whenever I want. You can buy it from almost any food store here.
• The forecast called for rain every day this week, and every day was sunny for most of the day. The most rain we had was for 12 hours between Monday night and Tuesday morning. So don't be deterred from the weather forecasts in the spring.
• Walking on the trails around Yang Ming mountain may be one of the most memorable experiences here. On a suny day, we climbed a few thousand feet into the fog of Yang Ming mountain. You really can lose yourself on the walking trails. The only thing you need to pay attention to are the huge piles of cow dung from the wild cows that roam the hills. You won't get this kind of detail from Lonely Planet guides!
• I will not miss the driving in Taipei. The scooters have a lane on the right side of the road, and they weave through traffic whenever they are moving faster the cars. Because of this, I have closed my eyes and prayed while changing lanes more times than I ever have in any other driving situation. I not sure why you don't see pile-ups on a daily basis.

The Day Market

In the states, most cities will have some sort of market on the weekends during the summer months. At these markets, you can buy all sorts of crap, from fake jewelery to knock-off purses and ties, to fruit and vegetables, as well as some fish and meats.

Taipei seems to have these markets on a daily basis, and they are much more of a focal point to the day to day purchases of the city folk than they are in the US. And why not, everything is incredibly fresh. I bought a pineapple that actually made my tongue hurt because it was so acidic. Orange juice is fresh squeezed. The fish was just plucked from the waters the day before. And the chicken - well, many of the stands have crates of chickens and a wooden barrel for all to see. Use your imagination, but let's say that the live chickens are placed inside the barrel for some time and metamorphize into a perfectly roasted chicken when they are removed. Did I mention that I'm attempting to become a vegetarian for the next month?

Seriously...

The market vendors, like most stores in Taipei, don't start selling until 10-11am. BUT, stores stay open late, so I feel this is a good thing for my lifestyle (I am not a morning person at all). So I called this entry the "Day Market" because the market is opened well into the evening, but it evolves into the "Night Market". I have not yet been to the Night Market, but I hear that it involves more sweets and snacks than the Day Market. Hopefully no chickens will be harmed in the making of the Night Market.

A Can of Worms

I had a grammar school teacher who made us memorize all the animal phylums. At the time, I think there were 17 and I remember the "worm" phylum making no sense. My college biology professor pretty much explained that the worm category isn't supposed to make sense - it's where scientists place everything that doesn't fit neatly into the other phylums. Hence the phrase, "a can of worms" (it's also my feeble attempt to include a link to something no one in Rochester has heard of but will find this interesting). So I give you the random things I've noticed in the past few days that weren't substantive enough to write about on their own:

• Three sheets of toilet paper will clog any non-commercial toilet in Taipei (read the "Bathroom Etiquette" post for more insight on this one).
• Public toilet seats are heated. This is so very important in a place where the temperature in March is already above 70F.
• Dentists wear sandals without socks (I think this would be a health code violation in the US), but wear the standard mouth guard. Maybe this isn't such a terrible thing.
• People driving on scooters will wear a fairly heavy winter coat and sandals...?
• People shopping indoors wear scarves. It's 70F, I'm wearing a tee shirt and I'm sweating.
• Taiwanese recycle everything. I'm not clear how this works yet, but the kitchen trashcan only holds a gallon or two and the trash bag hasn't been replaced since I arrived 3 days ago.
• "Go" is a popular game played by the father-in-law and looks like a bastardized version of "Othello". I play the simplified version against my wife and lose 3 times in 5 minutes.
• I'm not going to get much sleep tonight. The shopping district across the street from where I am staying is celebrating the spirit of their market. That means two things: bad karaoke and firecrackers. I love that they celebrate on a Sunday night. At least I would have if I went to college here.

Rules of the Road

My father-in law flat out can't drive. He hits the breaks when everyone around him is speeding up. He makes wrong turns. He often is honked at, and is inevitably overtaken by nearly every car that pulls up behind him (which is, to say, many drivers). There are many narrow two-way streets in Taiwan that require a car to move towards the curb to let another pass by. He turns onto one of these streets and notices a car already at full speed coming towards us and says, "that car was here first, it should wait first". The other driver must have thought we were playing a game of chicken. My in law didn't notice anything odd about the other driver's sudden swerve out of the way. Screeching tire noises mean nothing to this man.

I don't blame my father in-law, really. He has a few things working against him. One is that he didn't learn to drive until 5 years ago. His home is within walking distance to work, so he never needed to drive, and today, he only drives occasionally on trips to the countryside, or for shopping at the RT Mart (the Taiwanese version of Wu-Mart, while Wu-Mart is the Chinese version of Wal-Mart - try harder, people). So very little driving experience is one factor.

The other factor is endogenous to big cities such as Taipei. Like any other major city with heavy traffic on the city streets - New York and Boston come to mind - people drive a bit recklessly. There are few universal rules you need to follow:
1 - never hesitate or else everyone will pass you and you will get more flustered
2 - never leave more than 2 feet of space between you and the car in front of you or else you WILL get cut off

And that's pretty much it as I see it. Everything else is every-man-for-himself where the most aggressive person not to get into an accident is rewarded. Now there are two main differences between driving in the east coast US cities and driving in Taipei:
1 - There has been an emphasis in the US to give priority to pedestrians. That's not the case in Taiwan. If you step out onto the street, cars will drive faster to pass you.
2 - The scooters. Oh how I hate the scooters.

I had a chance to drive around the city and it's pretty obvious that the scooters follow almost no rules. They drive between cars, on the shoulder, and at a stop light, they drive past all the cars if you give them space.

What I found most interesting is that I was honked at only once in the hour I drove. Now I'm pretty sure I scared the hell out of a lot of scooters and other vehicles because I like to claim my territory. Scooters like to drive besides you in your own lane. I like to push them into the line of parked cars along the side of the road. Cars would try to cut me off, but would find themselves stuck when I didn't allow space between me and the car in front of me. I also liked crossing three lanes of traffic to make left turns. And none of this extremely aggressive driving elicited a honk. Only when I slowed down well before my turn because I was unsure of where I was did I get the horn.

So I think Taiwan encourages reckless driving, while it penalizes conservative careful driving. For my father-in-law, he never stood a chance because he would start out by driving conservatively, get honked at, and then he would speed up and miss his turns.

Bathroom Etiquette

Okay, a quick post about my shower in my in-law's bathroom.

What I mean to say that I took a shower in the shower room, which happened to have a toilet and a sink. Let me explain the layout.

The room is roughly 6' x 3', completely tiled, and the door into the room is waterproof. On one of the 3 foot walls is a towel rack. The door is located at the corner of the 8 foot wall, and two feet away on this wall are shower controls and a the shower head. Directly across from where the shower is pointing is the sink, AND ELECTRICAL OUTLETS.

I also noticed the toilet is called the "shower toilet". No, this isn't because it's located right in the middle of a freaking shower (though ironic). The toilet actually sprays you in the ass with water to clean up after you poop. I guess this makes sense - a wet cleaning probably is better than the dry clean you get from toilet paper...

But I keep imagining a lazy guy taking a shower while doing his business on the toilet, getting "showered" in every direction.

Oh, and as an aside, aparently the pipes cannot handle toilet paper. This is even better - a guy steaming up the shower room (let's not even bother calling it a bathroom) with his toilet paper sitting next to him in the trash can. That's what you call fresh.

What Everyone already knows about Taipei (besides most Americans)

Before I keep going with this blog, let me just say that my observations aren't news to most people (and that's why I expect no one to read this!), and they are my impressions, from an American who likes hyperbole way too much. Enjjoy!


The trip from TPE airport to my in-law's home gave me my first glimpse of Taipei. For a city of 10 million, the skyline is rather low - and yes, as an American, everything is benchmarked to New York City. My wife tells me that the city was built this way because of the frequent earthquakes in Taiwan.

If any of you are familiar with the world's tallest buildings, it brings us to an interesting question: why the hell is Taipei the home of the tallest building in the world? Yes, the irony of the skyline is that practically everything is 5 stories tall, and then you end up with this building that towers over everything else. Does recent technology make this building immune to earthquakes? I really don't have any answers, so I guess this is a flaky post. I'm going to have to do some research on this one and update.

The other noticeable feature of the city are the homes. In Manhattan, everyone lives in high rises. In North Jersey, some people live in high rises. When you get even further away from New York city, to Morristown for instance, almost no one lives in a high rise. In Taipei, it doesn't matter how far away from the city you are, everyone lives in buildings clustered together to hold thousands of people. It's crazy, and its EVERYWHERE.