I thought the village or ward chief elections were annoying. All those candidates coming by handing out tissues and election brochures, asking who I was going to vote for and then showing great surprise when I mentioned that, as a foreign resident, I do not have the vote.
On reflection though, I have concluded that maybe the whole thing isn’t so bad after all. As I write this, there are three scantily clad girls dancing on a stage just a stones throw from my balconey. Hey what am I doing writing?
That is a big improvement over the usual thing, which is that they don’t give you any tissues and in fact completely ignore you, because they assume that anyone who doesn’t “look” Chinese can’t vote. Is this a new trend? I was gobsmacked the other day when some Taiwanese people actually asked me the way to the Shida night market. I think that is the first time ever that people have not assumed that, as a visible ethnic minority, I could not possibly know anything about Taibei that they don’t know. Or maybe she only noticed that I was a foreigner when she’d already started to ask.
