Aw c’mon, Space wasn’t really that odd. 'Cept of course that he once killed a man in Arkansas. 
Space was a cool bloke. I miss him still – good times…
I saw a foreigner today. He was about 35 or so, wearing a high school boy’s sweater. He casually rode his bicycle past the sidewalk stand where I was eating.
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Tell us more about this Space bloke. I’ve never heard of him.
Who was that guy who got arrested in Thailand? He used to do tai chi and lived in that place / hostel that Mr. Lin rented out. Forgot his name. Another nutter!
Well, there was the time he ran into the big police station near Taipei Station demanding the cops come and do something about all the UFOs that were landing on Chung/hsiao E Rd…
Actually, Sandy is right. Space wasn’t that mad, he just did waaay too much ice.
Andy somebody-or-other. Mr. Quantum Physics guy. A bit eccentric maybe but not really a nutter – at least not for an ex-para.
I’m getting a little concerned. Too many of the names in this thread are those of people that were friends of mine. 
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Old habits die hard, Sandman.
They’ll be talking bout Forumosans some day – the bizarre clique of Taipei’s weirdo loser online zombies without lives.
Hey! Perhaps they already are!
:help:
A few years back I was relaxing at the main foreigner hangout in Chia-yi, a pub known as the Calgary. I was sitting at a table with several people, one of whom I’ll call Red, since he played football for the Crimson Tide. Red told me he’d just flown into Taiwan the past couple of weeks and was starting work in a buxiban here.
About a month goes by and I’m back in the Calgary, when I see Red again. I share a beer with him and he tells me about his misadventure with immigration in Taipei. It seems his Taiwan entry visa was only good for one month, so he had to fly to Hong Kong to get it renewed. So he makes his visa run to Hong Kong and gets his passport stamped again. Now instead of flying directly back to Taipei he takes the opportunity to make stopover in Bangkok for a week. Red sits there bragging about getting the women in Thailand, “Dude, when I was dancing in the bar, I had a girl one each side of me, like completely surrounded by women, and when I slipped, I just had to grab an ass to gain my balance!” Red was also bragging to me about all the drugs he scored in Bangkok (“really cheap, too, man!”).
So when Red has his fill of carusing Thailand and flies back to Taipei, he goes up to the immigration office in the airport and finds out that his visa was only a single entry visa. That means that he has to fly back to Hong Kong again and get a proper multiple-entry visa. Now this is a point where I’m sympathetic to Red – if I had to pay for a flight to Hong Kong only to be told I had to go right back all over again, I’d be pretty pissed, too. I’d probably do my share of cursing and make some small scene. However, Red went a tad bit too far. Red, a recent ex-quarterback now in a livid rage, is separated from the bureacrat by a plate glass window. Red is very, very angry at the bureacrat for informing him of the visa situation. Solution? Red punches his way through the plate glass window and starts choking the bureacrat. After the police haul Red off he makes a call to his buxiban and apparently they’ve got good connections because they’re able to spring him on probation – hence Red’s presence in Chia-yi telling me this story. I ask Red if he’s worried about being deported, and he smiles and says no; in fact, he says more than that: “I can do anything I want here.” I’m a little dumbfounded (understatement) at such blatant arrogance, so I ask if he’s serious. “Yes. I can do anything I want in Taiwan.”
I talk to some other ex-pats there and I find out that Red’s not exactly Mr. Popularity in Chia-yi; he’s been hitting on some of the women rather crudely and going around strutting like a big dumb cock of the rock, generally acting like your stereotypical loud, obnoxious ugly tourist. “He doesn’t realize that we’re ambassadors,” a teacher from Newfoundland opined, “Guys like him are giving a bad name to the rest of us.”
I wonder what happened to that guy. He more than likely eventually got deported. I just hope he went back and stayed back in Alabama…for god’s sake I hope he isn’t pulling his Ugly American crap all over the world, getting deported from one country only to start it up again in another…
But we’re all perfectly normal… click normal… bzzt normal…
Wow this is some good literature. The guy I met seems halfway normal by comparison!
Did Sideways Steve often dress up in animal costumes and shout random things at people who stared at him a second too long? Did he also play a ukelele from time to time?
Why did I exchange numbers with a dude I met in a bookstore? Because we got talking about something we’re both really interested in – foreign languages. Like a lot of foreigners here I suspect, I’m a dyed in the wool nerd who had to take a make up exam for Social Skills 101. One thing I’ve never really had good sense for is gender-appropriate behavior. If I meet somebody who seems interesting and cool to talk to, it’s nice to NOT have a little voice in my head saying “he’s a pussy” or “he acts like a fag”. I recommend any lad unlearn this kind of thinking – you might just make a new friend and expand your mind.
You’re under no obligation to expand any other part of your body. (I had to say this first before somebody took a shot at me).
Ha, yes, I think he did launder his money, as it were. I think intimidation played a certain role in his “success” as a busker, too.
There was another pretty crap busker from the hostel who we called Forceps Dave, on account of the marks on his temples from his Doctor assisted birth. He was a fairly good natured, but somewhat dimwitted, Welshman, who gained a certain infamy in the hostel for shagging one of those notorious deaf girls from Buffalo Town, while his 5 roomates pretended to sleep. In the end, we told him the girl had to fuck off. Which she did, eventutally, after stealing a few thousand NT out of pockets in the room. The Skank.
I mention old Forceps Dave, because, there was one time I happened by him, when he was busking up Chung-Shan North Rd., in one of the underpasses. He asked me to hold his guitar, and watch his case, while he went for a pee. I stood there, with the guitar at my side for about 5 minutes. Along came a family of 3. They stared at me as the passed by, and then held a little family huddle a few yards past me. In the end, the little daughter shyly came up to me and threw NT100 into Dave’s case, then scurried off. Fuck, how embarssing. I was just standing there, and they gave me money.
This reconfirmed for me what I knew all along, that most Taiwanese people regard busking as begging - and this is why, guys like Sideways Steve and Forceps Dave could make several hundred NT in an evening, and be the most crap singers imagineable.
Another hostel busker, Montana Chris, was much better. A tall drink of water with blonde hair, he was a big hit in the underpasses, and made quite a bit selling his own CD’s as well as live busking. One day Chris was busking when a gorgeous, super-model type came up to him and said, without any prelude, “Let’s go screw”. He packed up his stuff and headed up to Tien-mou with the hottie and had an incredibly wild couple of hours. When all was done, not said, he asked her if he could see her again. She promptly told him to bugger off, and he had to figure out where he was and how to get back downtown.
I guess “bizarre random sexual encounters you’ve had” could be the topic of an NC-17 thread, but I digress. Sorry.
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I think I know this person. I used to see him at the nanjing/zhongshan underpass, and thought, who would ever give this guy money? His voice was wavering and high-pitched. He was skinny, and kind of tall … I hadn’t seen nor heard of him since the mid-90s, probably …
But there was another wacko busker who I would run into, as well, in the same area, around the same time. He was English, in his thirties or early 40s, and released a couple of tapes of his music, which actually wasn’t that bad. He would talk to me and another friend who also tried busking in the same areas, and would regale us with tales of getting taken to the police station by the local precinct commander, and whacked with a nightstick while chained to a pole, for busking too close to the station (there was an underpass right next to a little station that was on Zhongshan, about a half km north of Nanjing). One time, though, my friend went to busk somewhere in that area, and got chased by the English busker, who tried to hit him with his guitar, and was shouting totally incoherent babble. We didn’t busk down there after that. I heard he got arrested later for heroin.
Disclaimer: I am not Sideways Steve, having reappeared on Forumosa of all places. LOL. Just thought I’d clear the air in advance, just incase, after a PM I received. 
Yes! That English guy! Who was he?! I can’t put a face to him, but now that you mention him, I’m sure I know who you mean. He was truly threatening, as I recall. Used to curse the foreigners that passed him by without throwing change in his case. That vato was loco, indeed.
Alien mentioned that French drug dealer in an earlier post. Wasn’t he the guy who did business out of the Taipei Hostel for years? There were legions of odd balls who called the Formosa Hostels home, but I always had the impression that the real whacko big league resided at the Taipei Hostel. True?
Judging from others’ posts, it seems that he was actually Welsh, and named Dave. Most of the time he was not threatening to me. He was actually quite coherent when I talked with him about the alleged cop beating, other than the fact that the tale sounded too fantastic to be true. But for whatever reason he just snapped when my Aussie buddie dared to play in that underpass one day. Other times he had seen us playing (alone or together) and it was no big deal.
That other skinny guy with the weird voice was also not at all threatening. I felt kind of sorry for him, because the music was the type of stuff that would make you walk faster and avoid eye contact. And I usually appreciate that type of music …
I am one of the legion. That is, a former resident of Formosa II. I don’t consider myself whacko … well, maybe a little … but perhaps that’s because I only lived there for about two months before getting a room in an apartment. There were definitely some strange cases there, though. A Moroccan/French guy who got into the gigolo biz, and urged me to come out with him one night, saying that chances were good I would get a hot lady as opposed to an old skank … he disappeared a few weeks later, several weeks in arrears with the landlady, but before he left he cut out the sections of her account book that contained his name, passport number, etc. I also remember an American guy, kinda nerdy, quiet, and overweight, great Mandarin, who absolutely flipped when he discovered someone had bitten off a piece of his block of cheddar cheese which he had bought up in Tianmu and stored in the communal fridge. Why he was living in the Formosa was beyond me. Ditto for a 40ish Canadian guy who claimed to be some round the world yachtsman, but for some reason prefered a dingy hostel. There was a 30ish dude from Seattle who took great pride in scoring college students at BAM and Spin, and screwing them in nearby alleys and parks, because he couldn’t bring them back to the Formosa, and they couldn’t bring him back to their dorms. It was quite a collection of characters over there …
I don’t know about the Taipei Hostel. That was down by the train station, right? I did know a lot of people in Happy Family (IV, I believe), which was very close to Formosa II. A good bunch over there – I still keep in contact with some of them.
No, we mods aren’t THAT prudish! Go ahead and start one on the Living in Taiwan forum. There has been a bit of scattered discussion of this sort already as Forumosans are prone to ‘sharing’.
Me too. Very briefly, before I had ended up in the hospital with my ex- husband (only a hot date at that time!)…
There were lots of weirdos in the hostels, but lots of nice folks, too.
At least 8 or so friends are still here that I knew then, in various stages of marriage, child rearing, or whatever.
Seems the real wackos couldn’t handle it for that long. Taipei suits us tough ones much better. Most of us remaining have only ever ‘cracked’ in minor ways. :s
Wonder if they’re still getting their share of loons at those hostels. Don’t think too many of them have discovered Forumosa yet.
Nice cheap shot there, matey. I’m well under 40, never stayed in hostel, and only talk to myself when I’m slightly drunk and have forgotten to put the milk back in the refrigerator.
um just so we get the names right the english busker was and prolly still is “manchester dave” but i still think this threads a bit of a worry…it’s a bit like that famous story “they came for the jews and the gays and the pikies and the catholics…then they came for me”. in fact if i place myself in formosa 2 c. 1991 i can actually see the people in the bunks around me as the men in white jackets lead them away one by one…and i’m the only one left, help!!! they’re at the door now…
There’s this foreigner guy. He works in a Subway by Roxy 99. That’s odd.