I thought about how, for some of the olds, the internet wasn’t such a fount of knowledge at the time of their emigration. And even if it had some info, they probably weren’t internet literate enough to access it. Or their arrival predated the internet entirely.
Then I remembered this thing called a library.
If you were here pre-internet then you should know that you were travelling to a third world shithole. It’s like going to Vietnam or India now.
When I first came, all I had was a rather torn copy of the Lonely Planet guidebook written by a guy who’s no longer alive. 
I think I landed up here with basically no idea whatsoever except it was hot, had earthquakes, thry make electronics stuff, people spoke Chinese and ate Chinese food and I was told not to hitch up with the first chick that’s into me. I don’t think I really knew a single Asian before that.
Yeah I had some kind of guide book. It was pretty good.
Well, I had been here a few weeks already. I knew it wasn’t Africa or something. What I didn’t know was that roaches could fly. It wasn’t in the guidebook!
going to a place and knowing little about it is great actually. in this day and age you can find out everything on youtube, surely that takes a lot of the fun away.
I first flew here from Bangkok, so I was intimately familiar with the flying roaches.
Is there a story you’re not tellin us?
About my Taiwanese friends? Loads 
About brothels? Not really.
Shout-out to Robert Storey 
(Apologies if you meant someone else.)
I’d already lived in China and HK so Chinese things didn’t really surprise me. I remember thinking “Wow, Chinese people can smile”.
Taiwan-specific, the second night a group of foreigners in a hostel asked me if I wanted to go to an MTV, which turned out to be something totally different from what I expected.
Nope, that’s the guy.
I remember going to an MTV when I was a kid… it was some kind of a place where you watch music videos… if I remember it right. It was in vogue back in the 80s.
The alternative is cleaning men to clean the men’s room.
It was to watch movies, I remember. And to fool around with whoever you go there with.
That book was the Holy Writ of All Things Taiwan. I still have my first-edition (1987) copy.
It reminds me of that U2 dollar theater where you go there to watch movies, except these are movies that are out on Bluray/DVD but you get a private room to watch it in (it’s a room with a home theater system in it). It just seems like a place where you could fool around with whoever you go there with… and being Ximen not necessarily with the opposite sex too.
Well I’m not doing it.
How about when they spray insecticide and they all charge the buildings from the street?
I’m a slight old head. There was the internet, and I did use it to figure out Taiwan’s employment situation but the other stuff why? I figured it would be like a Western country in some respects.
Every WTF moment I had was actually fun, good and useful. If I wanted banality I would have stayed in the US