Great posts. Thanks folks!
Guy
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Donât forget Ponderosa!
They had Park&Shop for a while.
Florida Bakery was a standby for the odd foreign item.
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Belgian PieâŚ
Publish your own book. Or help supervise and edit a new project.
I like your take on thingsâŚ
Hereâs my sewer taleâŚ
The Sewers in Tainan and my current town in were mostly closed when I arrived in the late ninetyâs but there were the babiesâŚ
It was like a video gameâŚ
You drive your little 50cc scooter 
looking for a place to park in order to by some lunch.
You pull in. Thereâs a mother and a toddler standing over a sewer grate. Pants drop, full moon shows, squat and plop. Sometimes hosed down, sometimes not.
Why they couldnât just go in the house was a frequent question butâŚ
Met a foreign business man in a dollar type store back in the day. Foreigners really seemed to be friendlier, more open and helpful back then.
He asked me how Iâm getting on. I shared with him my observations.
He shared that he had a kid growing up here and then they had open sewers used as open sewers and his kid started using the sewers for that purpose.
My memoryâs a little fuzzy about what happened in the conversation nextâŚ
I thinkâŚ
Richard Hartzel had a series about life in Taiwan in the China Post. Part survival guide, part history lesson. It was a Sunday feature. I spent quite a few hours catching up with the articles in the library on my rare trips to the cityâŚ
Hereâs one memorable tale told to the best of my memoryâŚ
Hereâs something many old timers know about but newcomers should take heedâŚ
There are stories of foreigner returning home from a night of partying. Instead of taking the winding road back, he decides to take a more direct route through the fields. All of a sudden the foreigner finds himself in a pit full of shit.
Someone told me that to farmers who were poor then used shit as fertilizer and it was valuable. Kids were told to bring it home if they couldâŚ
This sounds too fantastic to be trueâŚ
I have to verify this.
Iâm not that imaginative to come up with a story like this but who knows?
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How was dating scene back then?
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Very good. Most of the women then had long black hair and it was almost never dyed. They wore much less make up and there was no plastic surgery. They were still very pretty , but looked much different to today as the men did too.
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I imagine without phones, people had better social skills. Older Taiwanese are cooler and find it easier to interact with them
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I think those vets should have been younger at the time ? They probably seemed really old to you then.
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No doubt they had been through a lot.
Any foreigner who stuck around Taiwan at that time was not leading an easy life.
Guy
Ha yes I was just thinking that. I was friends with one called Dan I guess he was between 40 and 50. He was pretty nice to me although most people did not like him much as he was very aggressive. He used to tell me the same story again and again how when off his friends lost his head by a shell of some sorts and he saw it. Then there was one older guy in his 50s who served on a US submarine during war time, he was always angry. It was kind of long ago and yeah anyone over 40 seemed ancient to me back then.
The Dan guy told him a judge said he goes to jail or the army. He chose the army and ended up in Vietnam I am not sure how much of what he said was true although I know for sure he was there as he had a picture.
Yeah, one more big difference, girls hardly even wore jewelry then and nobody, especially boys, had colored hair. Boys didnât even wear rings never mind an earring or even long hair. Conformity ruled.
Or Wendyâs, Ruby Tuesdays, Outback and whatever other chains gave up the ghost here.
Hartzel was a good writer and a prominent foreigner who came in the â80s, I believe. I wonder what happened to him.
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I remember one column that Hartzel wrote about how when he first came to Taiwan to study Chinese that there was no way to go out to lunch or dinner by yourself as all the restaurants were the round table affairs then that only catered to families, groups, etc. He wrote that when the students brought this up with the teacher she suggested they all go out for all their meals together! Again, how things have changed
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Didnât Hartzell score one of those honorary Taiwanese awards a couple of years ago?
He had these events for new comers with local spouses to be. And the China Post (RIP) had outings for foreigners. And 100.7 FM was still interesting to listen to.
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Of course â ânight soilâ. 
I arrived at the tail end of the 90s so a lot must have happened in those few short years. There was definitely more than one MRT line, but Taipei was still pretty rough around the edges. I loved that wild west (east) vibe coupled with the sense that things were getting better (as opposed to worse) and that people were working on solving real problems rather than made-up ones. I wasnât much fazed by the general filth (I can recall finding a small cockroach in my nightmarket fried rice, pushing it aside, and finishing the rice). It got to me later on, when I saw the state of the rivers being filled up with sewage and industrial effluent.
I can remember planes being the quickest and best way of getting to the south - no complicated booking, just turn up at the airport within 20 minutes of your flight, pay NT$1000, and half an hour later an ageing MD80 has dropped you off in Tainan. Really liked the (dirt cheap) trains and the long distance coaches with seats like Blofeldâs command centre.
Also remember my gf at the time taking me to Wellmans for a dose of âwesternâ supplies (which, frankly, I wasnât bothered about, but it was a very sweet gesture). What was the name of the âfamousâ burger shop nearby? Is it still there?
As for the dating question, I settled down with the girl who took me to Wellmans (not because of that, I should add) but I had the impression that plenty of western men my age were having fun exploring the contents of the cookie jar, and there was a significant amount of interest (or perhaps just curiosity) from the local girls. If you wanted to, you could pick up as many interesting diseases as you liked.
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Yes you can. For a while there was a scooter by the name of Dick. It was always so easy to ask attractive coworkers if they wanted a ride home on your Dick.
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Wendyâs, love theyâre sour cream and chives potato. There was one in the basement of Nova, a computer mall in Kaohsiung.
Nova was unique too.
It was laid out like a flee market or ham radio swap meet.
Independent dealers selling parts or building computers at rock bottom prices.
A large variety plus since there many vendors selling the same products the consumer was king.
Theyâd get out the calculator and work out your âspecialâ discount.Agree to give up your âofficial receiptâ and save a bit more. Theyâd give you their own unofficial receipt. And no they did not screw their customer. We stood by their word and replaced or repaired the products.
Need software to feed your computer? Go outside and look for a row of card tables with notebooks on them.
First youâd leaf through the notebooks, find what you want. Next, youâd fill out an order form, place it in a box along with your money and take a five minute stroll
Finally, there was a floppy or CD sitting in the very same box you put your money in.
That must have been late 90s , I cannot even remember note books or the Internet back in the early nineties, pagers were the thing. Someone sends you a message and you call them back on a pay phone. What year did note books come into common use ?
Maybe I am confused as my first trip here was in the 80s. I think @tommy525 was in the 70s ?