The oddest foreigner you've met here -- share your story

I saw a guy matching this description earlier this year in the underpass at NTU. Guess he’s been around awhile.

Wolf was kind of given leeway. While obviously a bit homophobic he was openminded and genuinely curious about matters gay.

Usually the ones who talk most about it are indeed the ones who are most “curious.”

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I’ve never met one foreigner who was as crazy as any of these characters, let alone known the 20 or so he lists here. It’s like Batman’s rogues gallery. Either this guy has a great imagination, or this island used to be like “Escape from New York.” (Except with more pedophiles, smugglers and prostitutes. Wtf…). Maybe it’s still like this and I just lead a super boring life.

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22 posts were split to a new topic: It’s a word; get over it.

The weirdest guy was an mixed asian Australian guy who worked on a farm in Australia who only liked western (white) women. He was having a lot of trouble with dating and just general social interaction. His frustrations with the opposite sex often led him to have misogynistic rants in person and on facebook. Like, true misogyny, and crazy angry views.

I met him actually on here, he was asking for help and advice so I decided to meet up with him and just kinda take him out to socialize and give him some advice and maybe meet some people to build a social circle. So initial interaction was that he was just socially awkward, he wasn’t very well spoken and couldn’t draw you in with anything, very little care of his own grooming and fashion. But I guess some of it was from living on a farm and probably and could easily be fixed by getting a proper haircut and learning how to dress.

Added him on facebook and he began to get really weird. Posting very racist and misogynistic views and ranting. Saying some pretty racist things about women of different race, like one moment he would say western women were too independent and should know their place. And another moment he would say asian women were too submissive and love the white man. Thing about how men where superior to women and how they belong in the kitchen. He also wasn’t too keen on immigrants, which was confusing because he is a immigrant…and praised trump on the whole pussy grabbing thing… I would told him to delete them, and he usually would.

So one day, he posted something about trump, apparently he added my gf on facebook and she disagreed. He later deleted me. I had no idea why at the time. I later reported back on what happened on here. He signed on and said he deleted me because we had an argument about trump…but we never talked about politics. Noted I’m not a fan of trump but I never spoke to him about it and made it look like i’m bashing him because of political differences. Last I heard, he went to learn to be a scuba diving instructor in kenting. I can’t even explain how strange of a guy this was.

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I really haven’t met any strange foreigners here (partly because I’ve had no real social life since my baby was born shortly after coming here), but in Korea I knew a crazy chick who got evicted from her apartment that her school was paying for (she got fired for repeatedly showing up drunk or hungover to her cram school job). Since she was now without job, without shelter and without a work permit, the logical thing would be to cut your losses and go home… so she did the complete opposite and started camping out behind our local 7/11. She was essentially homeless. We’d see her sleeping at the plastic tables outside the 7/11, or curled up against the dumpster. One time we tried to talk to her, and I forget what you call this type of condition, but she had the kind of nonstop verbal diarrhea that seems to stem from extreme social anxiety. We were trying to help her, asking if there were any friends she could contact who would take her in (we’re good samaritans to a point, but we’re certainly not going to let her stay at either of our places), and it was like what we were saying wasn’t even registering. She was just pulling at her hair, not making eye contact, and ranting word-soup about how her school was trying to have her arrested, how she was wanted by the police, not super crazy stuff, but just crazy enough… it was more how she said it and her behavior than what she specifically said. So after that we just kind of avoided her, and one day she wasn’t there anymore.

Urban legend. Goes all the way back to Typhoid Mary.

Whoah folks. Careful with the “Reply” button in this thread. There are sleeping entities here that we of fallen later days may not be able to handle …

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Yeah, I figured the guy might be full of crap. If he wrote about one or two people, it’d be one thing. But how does he personally know (or knew) over a dozen head-cases?

I knew most of those people since I was in Formosa I and II the same time as mwalimu. The descriptions are pretty accurate.

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Yikes. Are they all gone now, or…?

AFAIK all the hard-core ones are. Funnily enough Steve was the first guy I met in Taiwan. He was harmless enough but terrible hygiene. He used to ask me the use of my Twinings tea-bag after I’d finished with it. Chris might still be around, he shouldn’t be on the list, bright guy very knowledgeable on Taiwan. Jerry was ex-NASA.

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Too much red cordial?

Funny how this one has been let run…Its also got terribly boring compared to the original thread when people could really put electronic pen to paper.

That Dave guy sure could paint a picture !

I miss Deuce Dropper. Lots of folks have left us or moved on.

Guy

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You’re all a bunch of poofters!

I know one person mentioned way, way above (the priest), and am happy to report that he’s fine. He has a small parish church. I must have run into at least one of the buskers in one of the underpasses. I stayed for a few months at TIYAC (this was 30 years ago) and remember a few dissolute characters from there (anybody remember Roman, the Ukrainian-American from Chicago?), along with many fairly normal language students and the like. I only heard of places like DV8 and Buffalo Town, since I don’t drink and can’t dance.

I also stayed for a few months at a hostel near the train station, whose name (if it even had one) I can’t remember–this was circa 1990. One of its denizens was an American with severe mental problems, who had just spent some time teaching English in Korea. When I met him, he had somehow lost all his money (perhaps by giving it away?), then discovered that he could beg on the street and get junior high school girls to give him their lunch money. I was delegated to contact the AIT, which turned out to have already made arrangements to bring him home. There was a French woman at the same hostel who seemed okay, but snapped one day (she seemed mad at everybody) and then just disappeared.

…just disappeared.

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Seriously though. If you want to meet colorful characters, seems hostels are the place to go.

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Foreigners in Taipei wearing big baggy yoga style pants and dressing like wannabe dropouts here similar to the ones roaming backpacker havens in SE Asia always seem weird to me because it’s Taipei.

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On the very rare occasion I see a backpacker here, I always think, “er…isnt that a SE Asian thing? This is Taiwan.” to me, backpackers look completely out of place here, except maybe Kenting. That is its own bubble.

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