10. My students, my co-teachers, my colleagues, my friends...
This one is obviously actually #1, but it's far too serious to put as my ending note. So, this is actually the thing I will miss the absolute most about Taiwan...but I don't have the heart to put it there. I love my students; I love my co-teachers; I love my colleagues; I love my friends here, and I don't want to think about the fact that I'm leaving then soon. *ahem* Movingon.
9. Standing out in every crowd
It gets annoying at times, but it's still kind of cool to be The Foreigner, worthy of stares and smiles and awe. And I'm not gonna lie, it's nice getting "你很漂亮啊" all the time from strangers. I won't quite know how to deal with blending in again...
8. The ability to pop up to Taipei or Taitung on a whim, or to fly to Thailand in just 6 hours or so
I've mentioned this before, but I have absolutely LOVED the ability to travel that this year has given me, coupled with an absolutely fantastic array of locations at my feet.
7. Living amongst the nicest people on the planet
I genuinely believe this to be true. I have NEVER met more kindhearted people than the Taiwanese locals, especially Kaohsiung locals, are. It's partly Southern hospitality (the same the world over), but mostly just an ingrained wonderful friendliness all over the island of Taiwan. They are simply wonderful.
6. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon off work
This was just a lovely quirk of my schedule all year: no class after noon three days a week. Never gonna get THAT again!
5. Playing the foreigner card
Not being able to communicate definitely has its upside. This is it: the foreigner card. "I don't understand!" Annnnnd you can now do anything you want.
4. Drinking ALL THE TEA
I didn't even drink tea before I came to Taiwan. But I will miss all the fabulous varieties of tea I've grown to love this year, and will no doubt try to replicate them on my own: grapefruit green tea, Oolong milk tea, Earl Grey milk tea (at least this one I can still get at home), yogurt green tea, mango green tea, the list goes on...and I will always remember being the sole one still ordering it iced when the temperature dropped to a "frigid" 60F or so.
3. Beautiful sunshiney days on my scooter
When the sun is out, my scooter is perfect. Wind in my hair, zipping along, getting tanned (avoiding the slowpokes...); in essence, perfection.
2. Fresh fruit, everywhere, all the time
Taiwan's fruit is the best thing ever. EVER. And it's cheap. I will forever miss being able to go down to the fruit stand on a whim and buy pineapples, mangoes, and watermelon and for less than 3USD.
1. Driving like a maniac with no repercussions
'Nuff said. Here's hoping I readjust before I get buried in tickets at home...
Showing posts with label driving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label driving. Show all posts
Friday, June 29, 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Scooter Pet Peeves
...because it's been a while, and I only have another month (ish) in which to experience (and complain about) Taiwanese traffic. So, what have I been noticing lately? Well...
1. Scooters might just be the reason for the terrible traffic light systems in Taiwan. This was actually a big breakthrough discovery for me. In America, as you may know, traffic lights are triggered in one of two ways: they run on a regular schedule, or they keep the dominant road on green unless a car pulls up to the light on the less-dominant road and triggers a switch. Well, so far as I can tell, this second system does not exist in Taiwan.
Rather, it is on a rigidly regular schedule which aligns all roads facing one direction--which is a bit eerie, at first, since it means that you'll be driving along, and suddenly see the traffic lights for every block within your sight-line turn yellow at once. It also is insanely obnoxious, since it absolutely guarantees that you will stop every X number of blocks, with X being determined by the schedule, how fast you're going, and how many slow-moving vehicles pull out in front of you along the way (but we'll get to that in a minute). The lights are so reliable that, at this point, I can pretty well tell you exactly where I'll have to stop every time I drive to school--and I know exactly how fast I have to go to get to where. (Woo, made it to Yisin this morning! Or: gaaah, Ersheng, I'm going to be late. Stupid tour bus!)
Now, granted, I've been out of the Stateside driving routine for almost a year now, so please correct me if I'm remembering it incorrectly. But aren't the scheduled lights there rigged so that, if you hit a green, you usually hit all greens; if you hit a red, you usually hit only one, followed by a string of greens? I don't think it' even something you usually notice, I just have a distinct memory of many, MANY trips where I hit all yellows, like four lights in a row's worth of just-long-enough lights--until eventually I hit one that I couldn't help but stop for unless I wanted a ticket and/or an accident.
Besides that, greens are more prevalent on major roads because the minor roads are almost all run on pressure sensors, which means that those roads only get the green if they're actually needed. And, after 10 months here in Taiwan, where the number of vacant alleyways with green lights as I sit at a red, coupled with a general lack of traffic law enforcement, has led me to routinely determining if I am at a "necessary" (stop and wait) or "non-necessary" (look and go!) red light, green-lighting major roads at the expense of smaller ones seems like a great idea.
A few days ago, though, while reading this Cracked.com article, I realized why they can't have them here: scooters can't trigger pressure-based lights! And since the vast majority of Taiwan's (or, at least, Kaohsiung's) motorists sit perched not in cars or trucks but on scooters or motorcycles, a lights system that caters to larger vehicles while stranding smaller ones just wouldn't make sense.
Still, it seems like they should be able to just develop a more sensitive sensor...or at least make the schedule according to actual traffic patterns, rather than an arbitrary grid!
2. Dear Car-drivers of Kaohsiung: We'll get out of your lanes as soon as you stop using ours as a parking lot. Sincerely, Scooter-drivers of Kaohsiung.
Most major Kaohsiung roads have one of two set-ups: either several car lanes, a barrier, and a scooter lane, or several car lanes, a line, and a scooter lane/road shoulder. It should be noted that, on the outside corner of every scooter lane and/or road shoulder, there are usually parking spaces. If there is no space for parking spaces, there is a solid red line along the curb.
But see, here's the problem: no one cares. Remember earlier when I mentioned traffic laws rarely get enforced here? Well, that applies to parking laws, too, to some extent. (I do see roving parking ticket-givers, but it doesn't seem to do much to deter illegal parking.) On any given road, with or without space to park, let alone actual parking spaces, there will be two rows of parked or parking cars. Double-parking is not just common, it's absolutely the norm.
But wait, you say, you just said there's no room for them to park! Ah, yes, but you forget, there's a whole scooter lane/ shoulder of the road to be used! Because, CLEARLY, that's what that extra space is there for, right? It's not like it's legally set aside for scooters or anything! No, this must be extra parking space. Obviously.
As a scooter-driver, this is absolutely infuriating. I'll be driving along, minding my own business, when I see that the double row of parked cars up ahead has completely filled up my lane. Obviously, I safely swerve left, into the car lane--doing my best to avoid the bottleneck of other scooters all also trying to avoid a collision--and get honked at. I'm sorry, but what? We're in your way, you say? We're in your lane, you say? AND WHY DO YOU THINK THAT MIGHT BE???
So sorry, car-drivers of Kaohsiung. I will not stay out of your lane--and, until you clean out mine, please refrain from asking me to. But, sadly, that's not even the only way cars abuse the scooter lane, which brings me to...
3. It's a scooter lane, not the pick-up/drop-off lane.
This one only really applies to the really big roads, i.e. those with a barrier and real separate scooter lane. Most of the roads I take to get to work fall into this category. And, on this one, I'm willing to shift the primary blame from the car-drivers to the civil engineers who designed the roads. They designed them terribly.
I already mentioned that most roads have parking spots along the far outside edge. What I didn't mention, though, is that those spots are almost always filled, being filled, or being vacated, thus creating a near-constant, yet unpredictable and largely blinker-free flow of very slow moving vehicles into and out of the scooter lane. There are no parking spaces or places to stop along the main car lanes. So, to get its passengers anywhere near the businesses/homes they're trying to get to, car driver must pull out of their lane and merge with the scooters, then find a parking space and pull into it. Not surprisingly, this is a very slow process--slow merge into the oncoming scooters, slow crawl lest you miss a spot; absolute dead stop when you realize there are no spots to be taken.
All this in the midst of normal-speed scooters just trying to make it to wherever they're going on time. It's insanity. Once, on the way to the gym, I found myself in a cluster of scooters who had to come to a complete, lane-wide stop because a tour bus had parked itself smack-dab in the middle of the lane and was disembarking its passengers. Eventually, a few people discovered we could still squeeze around the corner of the bus next to the barrier (barely!), while most just took the Taiwan-ordinary (yet also insane) option of taking to the sidewalk.
Civil engineers, here's a thought: car parking spaces along the side of the car lanes; scooter lanes exclusively for scooters. You'd have less double-parking AND, I'd wager, fewer accidents (no more unexpected merges; no more sudden car doors!). So, please? All you'd have to do is move the barrier and re-cast the sidewalk...
4. If you're going to cut me off, please have the decency to keep going afterwards.
This one's short, but I cannot stress enough how annoying it is. At this point, I know how fast I drive comparative to others; I can usually tell, at a glance, whom I should be ahead of and behind at a given stoplight if I want to avoid the annoying-for-everybody dance of passing and being passed. But others, apparently, either don't know or don't care about this.
This pet peeve manifests itself in two ways. In the first, as I'm stopped at a light, someone pulls around me and stops directly in front, cutting me off from moving until they do--which invariably takes ages and is ridiculously slow. My best guess for a reason behind this is that they don't want to breathe in exhaust fumes, which is fair enough, though a bit selfish, since they're directly funneling their fumes at me as a result. In the second, while driving, someone zooms around me and immediately slows down--usually so that they can coast at a good 10km/hr for a good block or so before the actual upcoming stoplight, which they will not actually make it to because they're aiming for the patch of shade 50ft back. I've been told that stopping back from the light in order to be in shade is illegal--it's dangerous, at any rate: you're intentionally stopping in the middle of the road!--but it's absurdly prevalent here, thanks to the desire to avoid getting tan.
And look, I get it: you don't want to breathe in exhaust, or you don't want to shoot your breaks, and you want to stop back from the light, or you don't want to get tan. Okay. That's fine. But please, PLEASE don't pass people if you're planning on doing it! Again, it's unsafe, selfish, and just flat out rude.
So those are my pet peeves of the day. And if you're ever in Taiwan...please remember: scooter-ers are people too!
1. Scooters might just be the reason for the terrible traffic light systems in Taiwan. This was actually a big breakthrough discovery for me. In America, as you may know, traffic lights are triggered in one of two ways: they run on a regular schedule, or they keep the dominant road on green unless a car pulls up to the light on the less-dominant road and triggers a switch. Well, so far as I can tell, this second system does not exist in Taiwan.
Rather, it is on a rigidly regular schedule which aligns all roads facing one direction--which is a bit eerie, at first, since it means that you'll be driving along, and suddenly see the traffic lights for every block within your sight-line turn yellow at once. It also is insanely obnoxious, since it absolutely guarantees that you will stop every X number of blocks, with X being determined by the schedule, how fast you're going, and how many slow-moving vehicles pull out in front of you along the way (but we'll get to that in a minute). The lights are so reliable that, at this point, I can pretty well tell you exactly where I'll have to stop every time I drive to school--and I know exactly how fast I have to go to get to where. (Woo, made it to Yisin this morning! Or: gaaah, Ersheng, I'm going to be late. Stupid tour bus!)
Now, granted, I've been out of the Stateside driving routine for almost a year now, so please correct me if I'm remembering it incorrectly. But aren't the scheduled lights there rigged so that, if you hit a green, you usually hit all greens; if you hit a red, you usually hit only one, followed by a string of greens? I don't think it' even something you usually notice, I just have a distinct memory of many, MANY trips where I hit all yellows, like four lights in a row's worth of just-long-enough lights--until eventually I hit one that I couldn't help but stop for unless I wanted a ticket and/or an accident.
Besides that, greens are more prevalent on major roads because the minor roads are almost all run on pressure sensors, which means that those roads only get the green if they're actually needed. And, after 10 months here in Taiwan, where the number of vacant alleyways with green lights as I sit at a red, coupled with a general lack of traffic law enforcement, has led me to routinely determining if I am at a "necessary" (stop and wait) or "non-necessary" (look and go!) red light, green-lighting major roads at the expense of smaller ones seems like a great idea.
A few days ago, though, while reading this Cracked.com article, I realized why they can't have them here: scooters can't trigger pressure-based lights! And since the vast majority of Taiwan's (or, at least, Kaohsiung's) motorists sit perched not in cars or trucks but on scooters or motorcycles, a lights system that caters to larger vehicles while stranding smaller ones just wouldn't make sense.
Still, it seems like they should be able to just develop a more sensitive sensor...or at least make the schedule according to actual traffic patterns, rather than an arbitrary grid!
2. Dear Car-drivers of Kaohsiung: We'll get out of your lanes as soon as you stop using ours as a parking lot. Sincerely, Scooter-drivers of Kaohsiung.
Most major Kaohsiung roads have one of two set-ups: either several car lanes, a barrier, and a scooter lane, or several car lanes, a line, and a scooter lane/road shoulder. It should be noted that, on the outside corner of every scooter lane and/or road shoulder, there are usually parking spaces. If there is no space for parking spaces, there is a solid red line along the curb.
But see, here's the problem: no one cares. Remember earlier when I mentioned traffic laws rarely get enforced here? Well, that applies to parking laws, too, to some extent. (I do see roving parking ticket-givers, but it doesn't seem to do much to deter illegal parking.) On any given road, with or without space to park, let alone actual parking spaces, there will be two rows of parked or parking cars. Double-parking is not just common, it's absolutely the norm.
But wait, you say, you just said there's no room for them to park! Ah, yes, but you forget, there's a whole scooter lane/ shoulder of the road to be used! Because, CLEARLY, that's what that extra space is there for, right? It's not like it's legally set aside for scooters or anything! No, this must be extra parking space. Obviously.
As a scooter-driver, this is absolutely infuriating. I'll be driving along, minding my own business, when I see that the double row of parked cars up ahead has completely filled up my lane. Obviously, I safely swerve left, into the car lane--doing my best to avoid the bottleneck of other scooters all also trying to avoid a collision--and get honked at. I'm sorry, but what? We're in your way, you say? We're in your lane, you say? AND WHY DO YOU THINK THAT MIGHT BE???
So sorry, car-drivers of Kaohsiung. I will not stay out of your lane--and, until you clean out mine, please refrain from asking me to. But, sadly, that's not even the only way cars abuse the scooter lane, which brings me to...
3. It's a scooter lane, not the pick-up/drop-off lane.
This one only really applies to the really big roads, i.e. those with a barrier and real separate scooter lane. Most of the roads I take to get to work fall into this category. And, on this one, I'm willing to shift the primary blame from the car-drivers to the civil engineers who designed the roads. They designed them terribly.
I already mentioned that most roads have parking spots along the far outside edge. What I didn't mention, though, is that those spots are almost always filled, being filled, or being vacated, thus creating a near-constant, yet unpredictable and largely blinker-free flow of very slow moving vehicles into and out of the scooter lane. There are no parking spaces or places to stop along the main car lanes. So, to get its passengers anywhere near the businesses/homes they're trying to get to, car driver must pull out of their lane and merge with the scooters, then find a parking space and pull into it. Not surprisingly, this is a very slow process--slow merge into the oncoming scooters, slow crawl lest you miss a spot; absolute dead stop when you realize there are no spots to be taken.
All this in the midst of normal-speed scooters just trying to make it to wherever they're going on time. It's insanity. Once, on the way to the gym, I found myself in a cluster of scooters who had to come to a complete, lane-wide stop because a tour bus had parked itself smack-dab in the middle of the lane and was disembarking its passengers. Eventually, a few people discovered we could still squeeze around the corner of the bus next to the barrier (barely!), while most just took the Taiwan-ordinary (yet also insane) option of taking to the sidewalk.
Civil engineers, here's a thought: car parking spaces along the side of the car lanes; scooter lanes exclusively for scooters. You'd have less double-parking AND, I'd wager, fewer accidents (no more unexpected merges; no more sudden car doors!). So, please? All you'd have to do is move the barrier and re-cast the sidewalk...
4. If you're going to cut me off, please have the decency to keep going afterwards.
This one's short, but I cannot stress enough how annoying it is. At this point, I know how fast I drive comparative to others; I can usually tell, at a glance, whom I should be ahead of and behind at a given stoplight if I want to avoid the annoying-for-everybody dance of passing and being passed. But others, apparently, either don't know or don't care about this.
This pet peeve manifests itself in two ways. In the first, as I'm stopped at a light, someone pulls around me and stops directly in front, cutting me off from moving until they do--which invariably takes ages and is ridiculously slow. My best guess for a reason behind this is that they don't want to breathe in exhaust fumes, which is fair enough, though a bit selfish, since they're directly funneling their fumes at me as a result. In the second, while driving, someone zooms around me and immediately slows down--usually so that they can coast at a good 10km/hr for a good block or so before the actual upcoming stoplight, which they will not actually make it to because they're aiming for the patch of shade 50ft back. I've been told that stopping back from the light in order to be in shade is illegal--it's dangerous, at any rate: you're intentionally stopping in the middle of the road!--but it's absurdly prevalent here, thanks to the desire to avoid getting tan.
And look, I get it: you don't want to breathe in exhaust, or you don't want to shoot your breaks, and you want to stop back from the light, or you don't want to get tan. Okay. That's fine. But please, PLEASE don't pass people if you're planning on doing it! Again, it's unsafe, selfish, and just flat out rude.
So those are my pet peeves of the day. And if you're ever in Taiwan...please remember: scooter-ers are people too!
Thursday, March 1, 2012
7 Months Sans Car...and Fun with T-shirts!
On my drive home from school today, I realized something: I haven't driven a car in 7 months now. I've ridden in them, sure, but never driven. All my driving has been done on a scooter, and the two could not be more night-and-day. And it's led to a few unexpected changes, both in me and in my mindset:
1.) My auto-brake-foot reflex has gone away--even riding with crazy taxi drivers, I never sense myself pointlessly pressing my foot against the carpeted floor, trying to slow the vehicle. It never did much good, of course, but it was nonetheless firmly ingrained in my psyche from 6 years of car driving. And it's gone now, my feet resting quietly now on my scooter footrest as my hands do the braking.
2.) I steer by leaning and pulling, rather than twisting. This probably seems pretty obvious, given the nature of scooters, but it was not until today when I realized that the now-natural motion of changing direction on my scooter is drastically different from the way I learned to steer a car, or even, to some extent, a bicycle. No matter how good a driver you are, a car always remains still pretty much just a car, a mechanized vehicle which you make do your bidding: it's a tool that you manipulate from the remove of a seat and steering wheel. The same cannot be said of a scooter; it's more like riding a horse, to the extent that you steer using tiny shifts in weight and pressure: a scooter becomes, in a sense, an extension of you and your natural motions. And they have to be pretty subtle, because...
3.) I accelerate with my hands, too. This was one of the hardest things for me to learn on the scooter: how to simultaneously keep a steady speed and turn, for instance, right. To turn right on a scooter you have to pull on your right handlebar; simultaneously, though, that hand is controlling the speed by pulling it towards you. Pull the wrong way, and you may go right, but you'll also suddenly find yourself going much faster than you'd planned. Quite the change from the oh-so-lovely-and-isolated actions of pressing an accelerator and turning the steering wheel of a car. But now, not having touched a 4-wheeled vehicle in 7 months, it seems perfectly normal and easy to do this right-handed multitasking.
So yeah, I haven't driven a car in a while. I've said it before, but I am truly fascinated and slightly terrified to see what my time driving a scooter in Taiwan, to the exclusion of both cars and consistent traffic laws, will do to my driving back in America. We'll just have to wait and see, though.
And now, I give you, another Unsolved Mystery of Taiwan!
This one is, perhaps, not entirely unsolved, but nonetheless, it never ceases to make me chuckle and/or cringe: "English" T-shirts. This phenomenon seems to be not exclusive to Taiwan, T-shirts emblazoned with either blatantly wrong or just plain awkward phrases, but I do till see a pretty high number of them on a daily basis. Today brought a couple especially wonderful ones which made me wish I'd brought my camera to school, but alas, I did not. I did, however, bring my notebook, so I quickly jotted down these beauties:
(spread across the entire front of a T-shirt in various sizes and fonts, reminiscent of a truck commercial):
"Variations in Color and Design MAY EXIST as a result of Environmental Factors"
(complete with more wrong labels and exclamations that I didn't have time to jot down):
"Grany Bigrs!"
...yes, that's supposed to be "Angry Birds."
(with a picture of a friendly-looking cartoon man, on a shirt being worn by a sweet 6th grade girl):
"My Dick would like to buy you a drink"
1.) My auto-brake-foot reflex has gone away--even riding with crazy taxi drivers, I never sense myself pointlessly pressing my foot against the carpeted floor, trying to slow the vehicle. It never did much good, of course, but it was nonetheless firmly ingrained in my psyche from 6 years of car driving. And it's gone now, my feet resting quietly now on my scooter footrest as my hands do the braking.
2.) I steer by leaning and pulling, rather than twisting. This probably seems pretty obvious, given the nature of scooters, but it was not until today when I realized that the now-natural motion of changing direction on my scooter is drastically different from the way I learned to steer a car, or even, to some extent, a bicycle. No matter how good a driver you are, a car always remains still pretty much just a car, a mechanized vehicle which you make do your bidding: it's a tool that you manipulate from the remove of a seat and steering wheel. The same cannot be said of a scooter; it's more like riding a horse, to the extent that you steer using tiny shifts in weight and pressure: a scooter becomes, in a sense, an extension of you and your natural motions. And they have to be pretty subtle, because...
3.) I accelerate with my hands, too. This was one of the hardest things for me to learn on the scooter: how to simultaneously keep a steady speed and turn, for instance, right. To turn right on a scooter you have to pull on your right handlebar; simultaneously, though, that hand is controlling the speed by pulling it towards you. Pull the wrong way, and you may go right, but you'll also suddenly find yourself going much faster than you'd planned. Quite the change from the oh-so-lovely-and-isolated actions of pressing an accelerator and turning the steering wheel of a car. But now, not having touched a 4-wheeled vehicle in 7 months, it seems perfectly normal and easy to do this right-handed multitasking.
So yeah, I haven't driven a car in a while. I've said it before, but I am truly fascinated and slightly terrified to see what my time driving a scooter in Taiwan, to the exclusion of both cars and consistent traffic laws, will do to my driving back in America. We'll just have to wait and see, though.
And now, I give you, another Unsolved Mystery of Taiwan!
This one is, perhaps, not entirely unsolved, but nonetheless, it never ceases to make me chuckle and/or cringe: "English" T-shirts. This phenomenon seems to be not exclusive to Taiwan, T-shirts emblazoned with either blatantly wrong or just plain awkward phrases, but I do till see a pretty high number of them on a daily basis. Today brought a couple especially wonderful ones which made me wish I'd brought my camera to school, but alas, I did not. I did, however, bring my notebook, so I quickly jotted down these beauties:
(spread across the entire front of a T-shirt in various sizes and fonts, reminiscent of a truck commercial):
"Variations in Color and Design MAY EXIST as a result of Environmental Factors"
(complete with more wrong labels and exclamations that I didn't have time to jot down):
"Grany Bigrs!"
...yes, that's supposed to be "Angry Birds."
 |
| "Grany Bigrs!!!!" |
"My Dick would like to buy you a drink"
 |
| "Hello, my name is Dick, and I would like to buy you a drink. Wait, why are you running away?" |
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