Look…I think we’re all a bit ‘different’, if only in that we’ve chosen not to do the normal thing at home.
But, some of us are more different than others. I have to say, I’ve met some of the strangest people I’ve ever met in my life in TWN. Sometimes it was enjoyable. Sometimes I really cringed. Sometimes it felt like you were watching a tragedy and weren’t sure what to do. Sometimes it felt like all three at once.
The one teaching gig I had when I was a student back in the early 90’s was at a church on Minchuan or Minsheng West. RD. next to the night market and the round-about on Nanking(then literally the Den of Iniquity). It was run by a retired army General whose claim to fame was having gone to school in the US with Eisenhower son or something like that.
I really liked it because even though the pay was crap, he really treated us with respect. On Teacher’s Day he would take us all to the now defunct Chung Shan Club for the buffet and he would pay us for holidays where classes were missed.
Before class we would all sit around drinking tea out of tall glass cups. What a collection we were.
There was me, an 18yr old student teaching on the side, riding around TPE on my highly modified Yamaha RZX. There was an oldster Kiwi who decided to stay after BP pulled out; took over the BP residence in Danshui until it burned down in the 80’s and moved to Yangmin Shan in the forest. He said he served in WWII in a Kiwi regiment in N. Africa against Rommel. I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth since he described several battled in quite accurate detail (the one where the regiment had to retreat with Rommel on both sides). He was also always forgetting his glasses and complaining about how no one would sit next to him on the bus. 
I’m not sure I would have. He also told stories about how you really have to watch the Norwegians when they get drunk. He was profane and garrulous. He was also very funny. There was a Brit. preacher, Father Griswold or something…(a big tall skinny guy with bush eyebrows and apublic schoolish accent) who had been in Taiwan most of his life living in rural Taiwan, starting at about my age at the time. I remember wondering about how someone could commit to such a thing. 
He preached in the same town for 20+ years. I don’t remember why he had to leave. When he was leaving someone told him that they felt sick everytime they heard him speak Taiwanese. I remeber thinking that was quite a cruel thing to say. He didn’t really get along with the Kiwi. He told me that the Kiwi was the type that would live on his own in the jungle until he couldn’t take care of himself and then would just off himself. he said it like he knew from experience. I remember being quit shocked to hear that. Then there was an WSR nun who never spoke a single word, just smiled, and a Taiwanese father with a bum leg (who would eat all of the tea leaves floating around the cup) who played the contrarian know-it-all. We would sit around and talk about this or that sitting on these old style Chinese office chairs.