Not a good example. In the USA its just as much frowned upon as people avoid to help, give money and just keep away. In Taiwan many people walk near them, and some give money, some bit more. I do not think people here avoid them of frown upon them, if anything USA has more taboo about them with such awful treatment of them. Your second example, sex with brother is that something that happends more in USA?
Come to Zhongli district to see what is the reality. No pavements, you have to be careful not to be hit by a car or a scooter. Check the restaurants while you are there. Last weekend I went to a nice breakfast restaurant, no English menu, staff doesnât speak English. No one can help you. If you are there, take a bus to Taipei, try to find time table in English. I could give you plenty of other examples.
lack of pavement: I can agree
poor transport: not agree, MRT (Metro) is way better. Clean stations, toilets, nice rail carriages, more service. Kao Trams also nicer, clear and kept up. Not used trams in Taipei area.
English menus: I just know this in Poland, stay at friendâs family home, area around her home Menu in local language but was not a problem with her translation for me (or use phone). In Taiwan haha I have no language problem. I do not feel everyone needs know English in place that is not the language.
This thread exhibits an amazing lack of self-awareness among the Taiwan defense brigade. I do like Taiwan, so I donât take pleasure in pointing out any of this, but in some areas the place seems to be completely stuck, with little improvement over the past 15 years, which ironically includes many of the things listed in this thread as being âbetter.â
Youâre not really helping Taiwan catch up by pretending everywhere else is worse, especially when it clearly isnât the case.
Most of the urban tissue here is a dirty, moldy slum, otherwise known as âgongyu,â with buildings spaced barely a couple of inches apart from one another, so that the sun can only ever be seen on TV. This includes much of Taipeiâs most upscale districts. There are bars not just on every floor but on every balcony as well as on many windows too.
And itâs really rich to claim anywhere else on this planet is âmessy outsideâ when compared with Taiwan. As @PeterB pointed out, is parking on the sidewalk worse than having no sidewalks at all? And the green-painted pretend sidewalks aka âpedestrian walkwaysâ here, if they exist at all, are readily used for parking too. Or driving.
Taipei metro stations are definitely functional, and practical. But are they nice? Except for a couple, they all look the same, and they all have this dirty feel to them, even those that have just been built. The wall panels that should be, and originally used to be white, quickly turn yellow, and the floor tiles donât look great either. Many metro systems in Europe have a different design for each station. At least theyâre trying. In Taipei, each station maybe has a different stamp and thatâs about it.
As for the rest of the public transport in Taipei (except the MRT), the best testimony as to the quality of it is that there are millions of scooters being used daily, which should not be necessary in one of the worldâs most densely-populated areas. Buses here, as much as Iâm a public transport enthusiast, are slow and just not dependable, while clearly also too expensive given the alternative. As a result, they serve mostly the elderly, schoolchildren, women who donât want to get dirty, people who donât value their time, alongside some others on a rainy day.
Iâve been really rooting for it but so far Kaohsiung has only had a single (1) tram line for 5 years so far. As far as I know, no further expansion is planned. So I feel the plural you used is a bit of a stretch (although there is more than one trainset and they do run in both directions). And how can the view from a tram be better or worse? Do trams in Poland have no windows? I donât know about the tram in Kaohsiung but in Taipei buses are routinely plastered with advertisements to the point you can barely see outside. Howâs that for a view? In many European cities this would be a no-no.
I see a lot of such vandalism in the riverside parks of Taipei, alongside some other places. Itâs an order of magnitude less of a problem than say in Paris or London but also far from ânobodyâ doing it here.
Poland was Soviet but Taiwan totally isnât China, right?
Or is âTaiwanese, Chineseâ a âpotato, potahtoâ situation too?
âProbably?â And just a couple of posts later:
Great self-own.
Taiwan does a lot of things really well, and the pace of progress has been amazing in some aspects. This shows other issues could be solved too, with the right approach. Thereâs lots of things that could be learned from Europe, even from Poland. Coming up with reasons why everything is great here already is a disservice to the place and the population that deserves better. Itâs one thing if people simply donât know because they havenât seen it for themselves. But someone with a first-person experience writing all this, seriously?
Iâve been to Krakow, just for a long weekend. This was over a decade ago, and back then it still suffered from the English lads on stag do thing, not sure what its like now. But anyway, I took my mum, and we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the Wieliekczka Salt Mine, the latter being the best place I have ever visited. Not ideal for claustrophobics though, and the former is not for the faint-of-heart.
The city itself was great, Kazimierz district as well as the old town was very nice and interesting. The food around either square was very nice, we had local tomato soup and pierogies if I recall correctly.
Iâve been hankering to visit Warsaw, Wroclaw and Rzeszow, the latter has the distinctive vagina-looking structure.