I agree women have struggles and they have to go through lot of unwanted attention but tbh i would rather have option to reject men to find the one i want. Also expectations are from every gender. Men arent taken seriously unless they are financially secure. There is a saying that only women and children are loved unconditionally. Men are only loved for what they provide.
Probably because most Taiwanese passport holders are ethnically Chinese. They also speak Chinese, write Chinese, follow Chinese traditions, and celebrate Chinese festivals…
Unless you think all these people are not Taiwanese, but actually Chinese. That’s not a blanket statement I’d be comfortable making…
The food most people in Taiwan eat every day is the common fare of the people here. Taiwanese food. Yeah, Taiwanese food is basically Chinese food.
I can confirm as half Korean. Heavy drinking is a problem socially. The Korean side of my family often drink a lot and I have an uncle that killed himself from drinking after being told his liver was failing but he just couldn’t stop.
Korean baseball players for example have this problem with drinking being a part of team culture. A bunch of Korean mlb players got DUIs that impacted their career. One guy got so many DUIs in Korea he couldn’t leave to the US to play from legal issues
Taiwanese people also smoke less. You still see smokers, but far less than Japan or Korea.
Sometimes, when I enter the lift, the air is so full of alcohol, that I might get drunk staying there longer than a minute.
And usually it smells almost the same even when I go back later and it is like that until the cleaning lady opens the door for longer when she is wiping the floor of the lift.
Edit: But, yeah, definitely I do not see vomit puddles or drunk people on the ground much.
I saw those here too, but much less than in Japan or HK. TW seem to be a tad more well behaved on that. They vomit a lot “in private” in the loos
That’s good to know because I thought Taiwanese smoked like chimneys. Many, if not most, of my younger neighbors smoke. The caregivers who stop by usually do too. The corner store is often filled with smoke. There’s usually some oldster outside his townhouse enjoying a cigarette. But yeah, it could be worse and I often wonder if it’s actually more similar to back home than I think.
Regarding alcohol consumption, I was surprised the first couple of times I saw whisky bottles at the table. One rechao style place would store your bottle for you. Thought it was funny one time when the table of four next to us had like 3 different whisky bottles on it.
Taiwan’s smoking rate is 24.4% for male and 3.7 for female, and that would land us under Japan in the WHO chart on the Y-axis, and also far to the left than most on the X-axis. So perhaps smoking rate for men isn’t that much lower than the Japanese, but quite a bit lower than the Koreans, but far less Taiwanese female smokers compare to either.
I do notice, when I go up to our Taipei office lots of younger smokers outside the office, the so called smokers club. (They always tell me its too hot or cold outside, I say quit?).
I do think Taiwan smoke (male) as much as Japan, but drink (most, not all) quite a bit less. I did think smoking was going down in Taiwan, but for me sad to see still younger smokers so this habit seems not die off so easy.
A big reason people used to smoke was to escape from the office. Also it’s so cheap to smoke in Taiwan still, but overall it seems to be gradually reducing the same as with chewing binglang (reminds me of the time I saw a guy chewing binglang, smoking and drinking a coffee at the same time…and I thought I had problems 
).
Add in an energy drink and that guy would be all good. 
Guy
Another myth is that Taiwan is high tech
Ok, the mobile coverage is good and cheap. But that’s about it. The chips produced in the foundries are designed overseas and made by equipment manufactured overseas. The chips themselves are largely exported to high tech countries that have a use for them
One of the things I just can’t understand is this:
If they would just use sensors and computers to time the traffic lights, traffic would flow better and people wouldn’t be as encouraged to break laws. And the police who are diddling the boxes could be doing something useful like ticketing the illegal parkers who are slowing down traffic and causing accidents.
Or the elevators. How many elevator banks require pressing multiple buttons in order to get the fastest lift? I’ve never seen this before.
Before I came here I got an Alexa device, because I read that Taiwan was high tech and I figured that with the looming internet of things they’d be manufacturing stuff and be early adopters. But no, have to order smart plugs and stuff from China
The paperwork, so much unnecessary paper forms and files.
A guy with a big motorcycle told me that most of the car parks only have front facing license plate readers, so the solution is to just drive around the barriers and never worry about paying. Brilliant low tech solution. Aren’t there also front facing traffic cameras?
It’s not so much what I personally think, more about what objectively defines a nation’s cuisine. I also don’t consider Mos burger to be authentic Japanese food despite it representing Japanese burgers.
If we want to call all the Chinese food here taiwanese, we literally must call burgers, sushi, and cucumber lays potato chips taiwanese food (which is what I’ve been hinting at in the food threads for a couple years 
).
If one wanrs to use scale and abundance…In this sense, dominoes pizza, McDonald’s, KFC is also taiwanese food based on scale and availability. I, however, disagree. The foreign foods are cerrainly the most common here, thats just basjc economics. They simply don’t represent taiwanese food, however. They are simply foreign foods common in Taiwan.
Essentially I am saying that scale, cheapness, and popularity dont define a regions cuisine. Traditions, locality etc do. In this sense, taiwnaese food is amazing. Just because most people cannot afford it or dont have access to it doesn’t take away from how good the taiwanese food it is.
Ok, and Chinese New Year isn’t a Chinese holiday
Lunar New Year, bro, and to get ahead of the curve, it’s cool to say Mandarin as well 
That’s not the point though, we are talking cuisine, not immigration. Much like we don’t think fried chicken is authentic Filipino cuisine 
No one is saying Chinese isn’t a culture, it’s just clearly a different one. You and me are Canadian. 30 years ago we always celebrated “chinese” new year in Canada. Even in school. It’s not a stat, but it’s a common thing to recognize and embrace. I exchanged red envelopes since elementary school, far before I was even aware that china was actively oppressing Taiwan, tibet and etc… It’s normal and widespread, even fun. But it’s weird not to recognize it’s a different cuisine, albeit various chinese regional cuisines are common here (and in other countries ) same with Japanese etc. There is so uch Japanese influence here as well, it’s probably where our addition of sugar into everything g comes from. But thats not Taiwanese cuisine, that’s food in Taiwan.
That’s crazy considering Japan made it so hard to be a smoker. You can’t smoke unless in a designated area and they take it seriously
The complete opposite of the early 90s where you could smoke anywhere in Japan. And I mean anywhere.
It’s totally different, the Chinese food in China is good.
What I think is weird is you insist on defining Taiwanese food as something most Taiwanese people don’t eat.
Well, not really. I keep defining taiwanese cuisine as something from Taiwan, not a cousine from another country (eg. China, Japan, USA etc). Taiwanese cuisine is legitimately excellent. It would be logical that people try to promote it more to both brings costs down as well as make it more widely available. I am open about it not being available to everyone due to finances and time to travel to a place, just pointing out what we are eating day to day is almost always foreign food. One could try cooking taiwanese food themselves and know the taste without behaving to judge economics.
One can also easily shit on Chinese food in foreign countries, like in Taiwan, Canada, USA etc. But it’s a foreigners adaptation to a cuisine. And here it’s mostly based on being a cheep belly filler. I agree, the Chinese food here can suck. The taiwanese food here is often amazing 