Why I love Taiwan

I am home so I’ll freely bitch about it as I would about where I am from if I was back there :slight_smile:

Taipei 101 area is too posh for me. Alas, even our cozy neighborhood has also been gentrified to the max. No more self serve places, no more round table family traditional dinner joints. One barely surviving independent noodle place. The rest are chain stores and “Westernized” pasta and brunch places. No character at all, and way too expensive for the blob they serve.

TBH, I love night markets, but not falshy plastic Shilin. I mean, Ningxia is quite turisty but feels unique because they have such traditional stuff, Taiwanese go there for old flavors. I love that. Even Ximenting for all its flash, you can still find round table order several dishes to share kind of places, neck to neck with cool cafes and line 2 hours huo guo.

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So when did you get here and how many years premiums have you paid? What contribution have you made?
I guess you are retired and moved here after retirement?

Maybe you should go home and not be a negative on our balance sheet.

See how it works when you think you have the right to tell people what to do , what opinions to have or where to live?

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gentrified? what areas are you talking about exactly? other than xinyi, but xinyi is the exception in the unplanned and unmoderated urban jungle that is taipei.

Lost my Kindle at the gym once and someone handed it to reception and I picked it up the next day. Stealing isn’t really a part of Taiwanese culture.

Unless you’re a politician or a laoban…ba-DA-bing ba-DA-boom.

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Here is why I personally love Taiwan.

  1. I don’t have to drive. You may tell me Taiwanese aren’t good drivers, and I won’t disagree, but at least 95% of the time I don’t have to deal with it at all. I can just hop on to the comprehensive train network and get to 95% of the places I want to go. Here in the west I realistically have to drive to get anywhere, or I have to get public transport which is always filled with the dregs of society.

  2. Customer service. I see people here moaning that people in customer service here are useless. That may be true, but they’re useless in the west as well. At least in Taiwan they’re actually pleasant. In the west they’re just as useless and act like they’re personally offended or that you’ve done something wrong by asking them a perfectly reasonable question in a polite tone. I am sick of being treated like the shit on someones shoes in the west just for interacting with people whose job it is to interact with me…

  3. Crime. Everywhere in my damn country is rife with petty crime. Break-ins, muggings, thefts. It’s rampant, and I don’t even live in a “bad” area. This kind of thing is just a complete non-issue in Taiwan. Sure you can go looking for it, but here it comes to you whether you look for it or not.

  4. The general conduct of people in public. The west is absolutely full of degenerates, and it smacks me in the face whenever I’m in a crowded city area. Junkies, ‘urban youths’, men in their 40s dressing and acting like teenagers, waddling fatties, people glaring at you. Taiwan is not perfect but every time I get on a plane I hope I’m sat next to an asian and not a fellow white person - and that sentence is painful for me to write.

Yes I’m in the west right now and yes I’ve had a bad couple of days.

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If by gentrified we define places that used to have local flavor and such has been bulldozed due to exhorbitant rents into a massive “upscale” brunch places, then my hood in Xindian has been gentrified to the max.

If you have to walk more than 4 blocks between Chinese noodle places, and the closest self-serve is next MRT stop -and there is only one there too- Houston we have a problem.

Yeah Xindian still doesn’t look upscale but good hole in the wall places are getting harder to find.
You are near Dapinglin I guess which will go crazy with development over the next few years.
I’m not fond of the ’ zhonghe/yonghenization’ of the neighborhood myself.

I don’t have any reason to love Taiwan. I’m on the brink of depression because of how terrible things are and I’m not even joking, but I’ll say that the lack of dress code is a very positive thing. It’s not like I’m always on flipflops or shorts (I actually don’t wear them at all), I just find it wrong to bother people with the way they dress. Such practice seems to be prevalent in lots of countries out there.

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Another reason I love Taiwan - no terrorism.

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Amen to that.

Probably, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some mentally unstable sicko decided to do crazy stuff and kill a bunch of people (which has already happened). The mental health is almost completely ignored here.

Mental health is completely ignored everywhere, even in western countries. Can thank the pharmaceutical industry for hooking kids (or forcing parents/doctors to do so, agree with it) on all kinds of drugs to control their “active” personalities when young. My generation called them hyperactive kids. I probably was one, too. My dad just told my brother and I to run around the block multiple times (which we actually did!). Time and good parenting generally solve such problems, not wholesale drug enslavement of a wide swath of kids since the mid-1990s.

But how likely is, say , an incident a la Tokyo sarin gas attack? In spite of what we think of the government/police enforcement here, believe me, they are paranoid enough to prevent this or gathering of chemicals for a bomb or any organized mess. Not that we trust them that much, but remember how they caught the Russians and their web based ATM robbery. It is basically quite impractical.

Moreover, and thsi is from my 4th world perspective, I rarely see in Taiwan the deep class hatred that feeds most terrible crimes and terrorism in our countries. There is a deep hatred to you for what you are and what you have that I do not have and will never have because I am not you and will never be. Many dissafected and hopeless, who do not steal for need but for the need to destroy. To feel powerful among the powerless. Trulyt in Taiwan there are many forgotten and those we see ocassionally giving trouble, but there is a difference between the rice bomber and the Songshan TRA bomber. Between the weekely killed my gf because she broke up with me guy and the planned organized maximum casualty maras or zetas.

I was just thinking about the 2003 Daegu Subway Fire where 200+ people died. Songshan MRT bomber is proof that it might happen at some point and there’d be no escape. Besides, in a way, it has already happened, just that the casualties were fortunately a lot less extreme (the metro attack in 2014).

Yep, but that is more a case of design, the nature of the beast -the metro I mean- and the amount of people that use it. In terms of safety, I distrust the elevated Muzha line a lot more. And I fear quakes mroe than fire in the case of the underground. And please do not watch the Metro Russian disaster movie!

As to te attack, again, like 911, it was a paradigm changer. Befroe 911, it was SOP to comply with terrorists as teh sitaution would difuse. Now we know the final objective is kaboom so fight to death or death will come too horribly. same with metro. people did not know what to do, could not even fanthom something like that would happen. Now they see anything suspicious and call on it.

One thing that we learned when we took our kids to the Taipei MRT museum up in Beitou (really cool if your kids have not gone there) is to immediately pick up the available fire extinguisher in each train car to use as a spray weapon against any attacker.

not that i go to xindian much but come on, if you miss the old raggedy places you don’t need to look hard. its what 90% of taiwan looks like. i don’t mind the new buildings. because then its shiny new buildings + raggedy old places instead of just the old places. i prefer a mix.

and heres another thing, some restaurants are new but they look old anyway. such as wen zhou da hun dun. theres a new one on my street, an uninformed person could think its been there 30 years.

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That’s not what the sign says, it says to use it, or a backpack or umbrella, to block an attacker’s blows.