Errr…
Help me out here.
Well, to be perfecctly candide 
, I love the vibe, the dynamic, the undercurrent of energy moving through the city. My hometown in Canada is cleaner, safer, more beautiful, more high-tech but much more boring. To quote some Taiwanese friends living in Canada: “Canada is a lonely heaven, Taiwan is a happy hell.” See you guys in hell! 
I hope you are referring to traffic safety. I think Taiwan/Taipei is very safe.
“Dynamic undercurrent of energy.”
Is that 'cos its built on a massive fault line?
Not just trafffic safety. People in Canadian cities don’t have to bar every window of their house and apartment for fear of having their house robbed. They don’t have walls topped with broken glass surrounding schools and government buildings. Because they know the cops are professionals, they aren’t afraid of calling the cops in the rare (almost unheard of) event someone gets kidnapped. They also don’t have to worry about being beaten up in police custody. They don’t have to pick up and drop off their children at school even when they live within blocks of the school. They have diligent health inspectors that keep restaurant owners on their toes with extremely strict health regulations. And they don’t have a communist superpower pointing more and more missiles at them every year and threatening them with invasion.
That being said, I don’t believe living in Taiwan is a particularly dangerous thing to do.
OK… 20-odd views and so far all we have is:
I DON’T BELIEVE TAIWAN IS PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS
Cool.
So… perhaps best off going somewhere else, then.
Everything on this site is sooo… negative
We had an old very long thread called “Things I like about Taiwan”
Try to find that and bump it up at front - as a matter of fact, a lot of people had a lot of things they loved about the place. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have stayed.
I love seeing guest posters dejected 
It’s good to have the freedom of being an outsider and not being expected to conform to the social mores that constrain the lives of those confined inside. And even to gain approval for not conforming and thereby confirming what’s expected of a foreign outsider.
Being able to take my 100NT hibachi downstairs and out onto the corner and have a damn barbeque whenever I want to - without getting stared at (besides the usual foreigner stares).
Taiwan is the safest place I’ve ever been. You keep your nose out of people’s business and they will leave you alone here.
Oh Hogwash! Chinese are almost as nosey and gossipy as the English. :shock: They might leave you alone but you should see my neighbors go at it!
I like being able to wear blue flip-flops, put on some stupid nightmarket t-shirt and not shave for days and practice my “gwa galley gong” while chewing bettle nut and drinking gao liang, hunced over in some alley while it’s raining cooking some “mystery meat innards” … and all without feeling like people are thinking I’m low class.
Whoa, that’s a factor four galley gong!
Moaman all these Taiwan precautions are rubbish. People do not get robbed here that often. In fact it does not pay to rob people as Chinese do not like to buy used stuff. All the bars are just panic for nothing. Most bars would not keep a detrermined thief out anyway. I lived in a house in Canada that had bars on the basement windows and we were robbed, my sister has been robbed three times and I know of a few other people who have been robbed in Canada. And no we did not live in a dangerous area. But in 7 years in Taiwan I only know one person who has had there place broken into I think he did not lock his door.
As for missles from China no possible threat of that until at least after the 2008 Olympics.
Well, I like the place in Bali, which serves mussels for NT$200 and oyster for NT$300. The mountains, the easy-going life are also big draws.
The openness of people, you run into here.
The warm weather.
Holger,
I don’t want to rain on your parade but I’d be careful about eating shellfish from the Bali area. You the Tamshui estuary feeds into this area. The shellfish are sure to be contaminated with a lot of PCBs and heavy metals…
How do you contaminate fish with PCBs?
Are there a lot of little cyborg prawns…?
I don’t know where the seafood is from, but my worry would be the Bali sewage treatment facility.
Now, that would explain the juicy oysters
That said, I would imagine that they get the seafood from somewhere else. I think I’ll ask next time.
As a matter of fact, live lobsters etc are usually from somewhere else. I once asked about why they charged different prices for 2 similar lobsters and was told that the cheap one was from Mexico, and the expensive one was from some other country in the western hemisphere
The Bali area is famous for having illegal oyster and shellfish farms/fisheries on the coast. I read in the paper recently that some of them were being moved by the police, even though they had been squatting on the land for the last few decades. Filter feeders (basically all shellfish) will concentrate heavy metals and PCBs (degraded plastics), when you eat them they can give you a heavy dose. In the Artic region they have a problem with these contaminants concentrating in the food chain. Look at the TamShui River. Nothing lives in that river. I’m just warning you. A few every now and then might be ok but don’t go crazy eating them every nite!
The reason I mention this is that there was some scandal about heavy metal contamination of shellfish or shrimp in the past.