Traffic around the world: Taiwan 1 (Taiwan)

When I first arrived in Taipei, late December 1974, my local colleagues warned me to take extra care out on the roads.  They said, “In other countries, as a car approaches a pedestrian crossing, it slows down.  If there’s someone waiting to cross, it comes to a halt.  In Taiwan, if the driver sees someone waiting to cross, he’ll speed up, especially if the person’s already started to cross.”

One of the three radio operator colleagues at Conoco Taiwan, Tom Tan, told me about a book by a journalist from Taiwan who’d done research on traffic issues around the world.  

For noise pollution levels, the journalist ranked these regions in ascending order: Germany, Italy, India, Taiwan.  

In another study, on parking in a parking lot, the journalist discovered:  in most countries, people would drive in through the entrance, park in the middle, and leave the parking lot through the exit.  In Taiwan, there’d be a cluster of cars around the entrance, and another cluster around the exit, with nothing in the middle, as everyone wants to be nearest the openings for a quick getaway.

On road accidents, the journalist had this to say:  in America, other drivers would drive the victim(s) of a road accident to the nearest hospital.  In Britain, people would phone for an ambulance and let them deal with it.  In Taiwan, a crowd would gather around the injured party, and be heard to utter, “He looks so young!”, “Oh look, he’s bleeding!”, “That’s an expensive-looking shirt!”

(Reminds me of a similar joke, back in the 70s, about Hong Kong people injured in a car accident.  The first thing the owner of an expensive car, say Mercedes Benz, would say would be, “My Mercedes!  My Mercedes!  Is it all right??”  If a bystander pointed out that his arm was bleeding, he’d say, “My Rolex!  My Rolex!  It’s damaged!”)

(Taiwan, 1974–76)

Traffic around the world: Jakarta (Indonesia)

I had been giving private tuition to a group of Indonesian teenagers whose parents had sent them to Singapore for their education.  They kept telling me I must go and visit their country, so during the end-of-year school holidays in December, that was what I did, staying with student Honi Handaya’s family.

    On my second day, Honi took me out to explore Jakarta.

    The driving was hair raising, to put it mildly, with smaller vehicles like motorcycles, bicycles and becak trishaws weaving their suicidally fearless and reckless way in and out of the throng of buses and cars.

    Sitting in one of these becak trishaws, you are only at the level of the wheel of a bus, so it was very frightening to be about a hair’s breadth from these tons of metal thundering past.

    Also, the becak rider is behind the passenger, which means that the passenger doesn’t have the driver between him/her and the vehicle in front to take the impact of any collision.

    After that leg-wobbling experience, I suggested we take the bus instead.

    Honi took me to where a cluster of people were standing by the road.  That was the bus stop.  No post, no board with bus numbers, let alone a board setting out the routes (which we didn't have in Singapore at the time anyway, so I was used to this last element).  Just a bunch of people to mark the spot.  

    I asked Honi, “How do we know which bus is going where?”  She said, “The conductor will announce the stops.”

    Whenever a bus — unmarked on the front — arrived, the knot of people would surge forwards as it approached, looking expectantly and listening intently.

    The conductor would hang out of the door, shouting out the names of all the stops from that point on.

    Those who heard the name of their stop on the list would leap on.

    The rest would step back to wait for the next bus -- when the whole process would repeat itself.

    Hahahahahaha, quite mad, but most entertaining to watch!

(Jakarta, Indonesia / December 1973)

* becak [pronounced beh-tjak]:  from the Hokkien / Fujianese dialect pronunciation of 馬車 / 马车 mǎchē / “horse vehicle”.  

(From googling) Quote A becak (pronounced beh-chak) is a traditional Indonesian three-wheeled pedicab or cycle rickshaw used for public transport. It features a front seat for one or two passengers and is powered by a driver paddling a bicycle from behind, offering a slow, open-air way to navigate urban neighborhoods. Unquote

Exploiting loopholes (UK)

In the 22 March 2015 BBC Radio 4 programme On Your Farm—about a sheep farmer in the Shetlands*—the journalist commented to the farmer that the cost of transporting the sheep to markets anywhere must be very high, thus adding to the price of his sheep.

This reminds me of another Shetland sheep story reported in the newspaper some three decades or so ago.  Because their farms were so remote, Shetland sheep farmers could get a discount on the ferry if they were transporting sheep.  One (or more?) such farmer would take a sheep with him in the car when he went shopping in the nearest town on mainland Scotland so that he would qualify for the discount.

Around the same time that this story came out, or a bit earlier, shops in the UK were not allowed to open for business on a Sunday unless they were selling vegetables.  A furniture store started selling carrots for something like £300/lb. (0.4536kg), giving away a “free” sofa with the carrots.  (I’m not sure how long it took the authorities to catch up with them and close the loophole.)

*Shetland Islands |ˈSHetlənd| (also Shetland or the Shetlands )

a group of about 100 islands off the north coast of Scotland, northeast of the Orkneys, that constitute the administrative region of Shetland; pop. 21,800 (est. 2009); chief town, Lerwick. Together with the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands became a part of Scotland in 1472.

DERIVATIVES

Shetlander noun

(UK, early 1980s)

Peruvian ways (Peru)

February 2015:  Unearthed my journal from my first trip to Peru in June 1986, and these excerpts (in chronological order of occurrence as we travelled from Lima up to Cuzco) just make me chuckle:

Excerpt 01:  Pisco.  We packed and bought tickets for the 3.15pm [long distance Pisco-to-Ica bus].  The wall chart at the bus terminus says 3pm and 3.30pm, and then the bus left at 2.40pm!  I suppose this is how you filter out overcrowding — by wrong-footing the passengers with crazy, shifting time-keeping!

[NB: Being a long distance bus service, they wouldn’t have had a bus leaving at 3pm, one at 3.15pm, one at 3.30pm, which is too frequent at 15-minute intervals, so it must've been purely the Peruvian fluid time-keeping. ed.]

Excerpt 02:  2.5-hour journey [from Ica] to Nazca.  Well, add to that an hour late in departing from Ica.  The driver then stopped for lunch about half an hour out of Ica despite protests from passengers.

Excerpt 03:  Nazca.  The two strange American chaps (one doing weights, the other very dark skinned with greyish hair) were leaving for Chile via Tacna.  Their bus was something like an hour late — we should’ve booked the 7.30pm instead of the 9.30pm then for Arequipa!  Sure enough, our bus came at about 10.30, and then we found two women in our seats.  The driver finally got a chap with an empty seat next to him to move to the back.  I’m sure two other chaps also got moved off the bus to make room for us but maybe I was wrong.

Excerpt 04:  Cuzco.  Arrived from Juliaca after sundown.  Collected at the train station by mini-bus, 10 of us tourists packed in like the locals are, and driven through unlit streets.  We were told that we were going this way into town because the direct route had suffered the effects of an earthquake.  At one point, the driver turned left into another unlit street and I saw the headlights of two mini-buses coming towards us, side by side.  It was one overtaking the other just before the junction!  I let out a long and low, “Ohhhhhhhhh…!” and the other passengers laughed at me.  Somehow, in a Peruvian sort of way, we managed to avoid a head-on collision.  With nine gringos in the bus, it was laughed off — the locals would probably not even have noticed it, let alone bat an eyelid.

[Gringo: what Peruvians call (usually white) foreigners — one version says this is from when the latter first arrived and, homesick, used to sing around the campfires, Green Grow The Rushes (in their own homeland).  You can google for more precise versions.]

Excerpt 05:  Cuzco.  Outside the [hotel] bathroom window which overlooks the Indian shacks by the Machu Picchu railway track under the bridge, the train was leaving noisily for Machu Picchu, hooting its way out of town like it does into town.  I remember the TV series Great Railway Journeys of the World — the one on Peru was about the world’s highest railway:  as the train was getting out of town, it had to hoot continuously because there were people selling, working, resting on the tracks.  People gathered up their things and chickens, and one peasant had a goat which refused to budge, so the train had to stop until the animal could be persuaded.

Excerpt 06:  Cuzco.  Tried to look for the Viasa office to change date of departure from Peru from the 20^th to the 27^th, giving us one more week to enjoy Cuzco.  It turned out to be a nightmare — everyone (including the traffic policeman in a little kiosk in the middle of the long road where the Viasa office was meant to be, according to the guide book) giving us wrong directions rather than saying they didn’t know.  

[ed., 2015:  This was something the guide book did warn us against:  Peruvians, or maybe all South Americans, will just give you any answer rather than say they don’t know.]

Excerpt 07:  Cuzco.  The man at the camping equipment hire shop said we could go back the next morning to collect the equipment, saying that they open at 9.  I said, “So we’ll see you at 9.”  He said, “No, come at 10.”  I said, “I thought you said you open at 9?”  He said, “Yes, 9, 10, something like that.  Come at 10.”

(Peru, 1986)

Old school values (Singapore)

When I was ten years old, I’d read about British teenagers having a summer job or even a yearlong one, e.g., as a newspaper delivery boy/girl, earning some pocket money.  Being keen to be financially independent, I used to envy them, as this was not available to someone my age in Singapore.  

A couple of years later, about two weeks before the start of the new school year, my uncle, who ran a bookshop supplying schools with textbooks, asked me if I’d like to assist him for the fortnight at one of the schools.  I was really excited about it, and felt very grown-up, working and earning some money, even if it was only two weeks’ worth and really just pocket money.

When my uncle came to pick me up, he found me clad in flip flops, the standard tropical weather footwear.  “They are too casual for work!  Go and put on some proper shoes.”

Thirty-two years later, I was on a visit home.  My uncle said he’d like to take my mother and me out to dinner.  I was staying at my brother’s, so his son, Kaikai (aged 17), was included.  

While we were waiting for my uncle to arrive in his car, I noticed Kaikai was in flip flops.  As my uncle was treating us to a meal, I didn’t think it would be the more common casual Singapore style — at a roadside stall, or in a food court — but at a restaurant: air-conditioning, tablecloths, napkins, with waiters and waitresses standing to attention not far away.  I said to Kaikai, “Ooh, you’re going to get ticked off wearing flip flops,” and told him about my own experience more than three decades earlier, when I was a few years younger than he.

Sure enough, when my uncle arrived, the first thing he noticed were the objectionable footwear.  Kaikai was told to “go and put on some proper shoes”.

(Singapore, 1965 / 1997)

Colour-blindness (Singapore / London)

During my BA days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), I noticed one day a boy in my classical Chinese class wearing one pale green sock and one pale blue sock.  It turned out he was colour-blind.  On subsequent occasions, I discovered he couldn’t differentiate between dark green and dark red (maroon) when I pointed out the beds of tulips in a park and he couldn’t find them.  Ditto when I remarked on a lawn dotted profusely with tiny daisies.

This reminded me of my eldest sister’s friend back in the 60s in Singapore.  For some reason, he managed to pass his driving test — maybe it wasn’t a widely-known condition then?  If the traffic lights were aligned vertically, he’d know the top light was red and the bottom green.  If they were horizontal, however, he’d wait until the cars around him started driving off before he would.  If the roads were deserted and his was the only car, the poor chap would sit there for a while, not knowing if he should drive off, or he’d wait until another car appeared on the scene to give him an indication.  (Singaporeans are so law-abiding that they wouldn’t dare violate the law even if there were no other cars around for him to pose any danger to them.)

(Singapore, mid-1960s; London, late 1970s)

No common sense AND obstinate to boot (France)

Found in my journal entry of 05 September 2011 an account of my waiting at the luggage claim conveyor belt at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport:

This country-bumpkin-looking English woman (60s?), visiting her brother in midi-Pyrénées, picked out a total of 3 bright dark pink suitcases as hers before eventually identifying the right one.  They were all different shapes and shades of pink/red, but she still couldn’t be quite sure about each one, saying she’d need to look at her name tag before she could be sure.  I said to her, over and over again, that she should’ve tied a ribbon or something to it to make it stand out for easy and speedy identification, because the conveyor belt made it difficult to read labels fast enough.  

As if this wasn’t a stupid enough way of going about it, I had to lug the suitcase off the conveyor belt each time for her to have enough time to look at the tags for her name at close quarters, and put it back on when it turned out not to be hers.  The owner of the 2^nd or 3^rd one came hurrying over to claim her suitcase when she saw me taking it off the belt.  Luckily she wasn’t angry with me — if this was China or S.E.Asia, I’d have got a dirty and suspicious look almost for sure.  

The other amazing thing about this rather stupid woman is that each time I suggested she tie some form of distinguishing item to her case, she’d say, “As long as I can read the label to see if it’s got my name on it, it’ll be all right.”  Yes, madam, but someone else has to hump it off the conveyor belt for you first, then lift it back on to the belt.  I told her I have a black case, so I tie a strip of cloth to help speedy identification.  She said, “But your case is black, and there’re lots of them.  Mine’s red.”  Yet she managed to mistake 3 other red/pink ones before she found her own.  It’s most incomprehensible why she was still so recalcitrant about taking on board the suggestion.  Kept saying she just needed to see her name on the label.  I refused to give up and said it every time it happened, and eventually she said, “OK, point taken,” in a tone of voice that said I was being bossy.  Ungrateful on top of having no common sense.  

In hindsight, I should’ve just left her alone to drag every single similar-looking red/pink suitcase off the conveyor belt by herself each time.  Maybe she’ll learn when she has to find out the hard way.

From what I’d seen of this woman’s lack of common sense, I wouldn’t be surprised if, after finding out that the suitcase wasn’t hers, she’d just leave it on the floor instead of putting it back on the conveyor belt.  I was the victim of such stupid behaviour at Gatwick one year when I’d waited at the conveyor belt until, an hour later, every single piece of luggage had been claimed, then found that my suitcase had been left sitting on the floor at the far side, obviously by someone who’d originally thought it was his/hers.

(France, 2011)