Obsessions

Another uneventful day--which is not altogether a bad thing! The only moment of productivity today came first thing in the morning when, at 9am, we met up to go get physicals for our drivers licenses at the local hospital. After that, it was a nap, then some studying for said license test (which we will now be taking next week, since we didn't today), then reading and TV-watching for the rest of the day. It was glorious.

But, all that to say, not much to blog about. So, instead of an update on my day, I'll use my favorite little content-building technique: a list. And I shall call this list...

Taiwanese Obsessions I've Noticed Thus Far

1. The people of Taiwan are obsessed with plastic. Plastic bags, plastic seals, plastic straws, plastic bottles--it's everywhere.

This is just a very small sampling of the bottles I've used since I got here--the ones I finished at home and been too lazy to take out to the recycling right away. Also worth noting is that I go through one of the large water bottles about once every two or three days. You do the math.

Anytime you order iced tea or juice here, you receive a plastic cup topped by a plastic seal which, together with a plastic-enshrined plastic straw, come nestled inside a plastic bag. Anytime you buy a beverage at 7-11--which you do daily, often in plastic bottles, and often water, thanks to the non-potable tap water--you receive a plastic straw. Today at McDonald's, I saw them put three paper bags full of food inside a larger plastic bag before giving it to the customer. From what I can tell, this phenomenon stems in part from the fact that most people commute via scooter, and the one storage capacity scooters always have (besides room in the seat) is a hook for bags. But still, this plastic obsession is odd when combined with....

2. Their obsession with recycling. I'm quite glad about this obsession, given #1 on this list, and the fact that until recently Kaohsiung was one of the most polluted cities in Southeast Asia, and the most polluted city in Taiwan. They used to say you could write calligraphy with the water from the Love River. This is, fortunately, no longer the case; now, the emphasis on recycling makes me feel like I'm back in Seattle, with many restaurants having multiple trash cans for different types of waste. It is a bit annoying, though, having to rinse and sort everything, including food waste, all the time--after lunch each day, we have a whole ordeal of scraping out our (cardboard) lunch boxes which we can never finish into one bag, then putting the boxes themselves in another bag, and putting our used napkins and disposable chopsticks into a third bag. Our plastic drink cups/bottles do, I think, go in a fourth bag after they are rinsed, but I've never quite been able to figure that part out.

3. Another thing I've not quite figured out is the Taiwanese obsession with receipts. You get a receipt with absolutely every purchase and, as I've mentioned with the whole drinks situation, you make a lot of small purchases. And each and every receipt you get is long and thin and about three times the size it needs to be to contain all the information. I know that, with 7-11 at least, they have a lottery based on your receipt numbers, but I haven't been able to figure out yet whether or not that system is universal, or how and when you find out if you've won. So I just throw mine away, but somehow they still seem to show up constantly clogging my wallet and falling out of my purse. It's obnoxious.

Again, a very small selection: those receipts collected after I found out there was a lottery and before I realized that I have no clue how that information can be of any use to me and began throwing them away again.

I know the point of this program is to spread cultural exchange, so I have the feeling my lists will proliferate with more little amusing quirks of Taiwanese culture in the coming months. But for now, I'll leave my list at this: two ways in which Taiwanese people use a lot of resources, and one way in which they deal with the leftovers.