Leave your guns at home, kids.

This past holiday season, my Christmas Wish was for every gun to turn into a Kiss Gun.

Last week was a perfect example of people who would have benefited from my wish:

In Texas, a 15 year old kid brought a pellet gun to school and assaulted another student. According to this New York Times brief, he not only didn't tell anyone it wasn't a "real" gun, but he also pointed it at police officers on the scene. After not complying with the police officers' multiple demands to drop the gun, he was shot twice and killed.

Parenting Awards

Can you think of a word to describe a person who has the following thought process:

Directly Translated

I am a teacher of the English language. My job description is pretty clear: teach English. The way this differs from a translation website or a dictionary is that, although some things CAN be directly translated, it doesn't always sound right.

So my job is not only to teach English, but to make sure it's being used properly. Here's how things can get interesting:

Target Audiences

Watching a sporting event on television in the U.S., you'd be likely to see advertisements for Axe, Old Spice, Miller Lite, car wax, and Viagra in between innings, periods, halves, quarters, etc.

Right now, I'm watching a baseball game between two Taiwanese teams, and

Free money

How great is it when you put on your coat for the first time since last winter, only to discover you left a $5 bill in it? That's essentially free money. You just got paid to wear that coat.

Having an extremely optimistic attitude towards everything helps grasp this crazy "free money" logic

Obstacle Course

I'm not saying that Taiwanese people are completely oblivious to personal space/their surroundings, but they're somewhere between that and hyper-aware.

If you'd like, you can attribute some of this ranting to the fact that most of the situations happen in the morning on the way to work, so I might be a little cranky. My only argument is that it's not the only time of day it happens.

There are quite a few people that start their daily commute at around 8:00 AM, including myself. Living on the 23rd floor (out of a possible 24), I'm usually the first one on the elevator. I also usually plan for the elevator taking an extra 3 or 4 minutes to get to the 1st floor, since we stop. at. every. floor. on. the. way. down. Being the first one aboard the elevator, I inevitably end up in the back. This morning, as 1 of 7 passengers, I was the only one getting off on the 1st floor. The rest were waiting for B1, B2, or B3 to get to their vehicles. However, when the elevator stopped at the 1st floor, not a single person thought anyone would want to get off. Even as I tried to politely say "excuse me" and squeeze my way to the doors, everybody in the mirror-walled elevator pretended not to see or hear me. They were content with not pushing the "<||>" button and letting me join them in the basement. With a fair amount of force, I finally broke free from my corner and made it to the door just as it closed on my shoulders, then spit me out, and I stumbled outside.

I shook my head in disbelief the whole way to work as I dodged fellow pedestrians on the sidewalk. And when I say "sidewalk," I really mean "scooter parking area." The space between a row of parked scooters and the wall of a building is just big enough for an average sized person to fit. In Taiwan, these areas are used as pit stops so you can adjust your shoe, put up/down your umbrella, decide to suddenly start walking like a snail, or, my favorite, wait with 4 other people for your breakfast. Amazing.

Rainy days are the most interesting days because every single person has an umbrella. Just another thing to not be aware of how big it is or how it's going to affect other people around you.

On the bright side, walking to work wakes me up because it forces me to be alert and think outside the box for solutions to what seem like easy problems. I'm just sayin'...

[by the way... thanks for all the comment love! I think the joke was lost in translation, but I wasn't just fishing for responses or for you to say you miss me. I know you do! All 10 of you!!!]

Right of Passage

I think now that I've been here for over a year, I can start to vent some pet peeves and idiosyncrasies about Taiwan. Every place has them, and most probably aren't exclusively practiced in one place, so that makes it fair to point them out.

When navigating your way through Taipei's train/subway system, the "right of way" is granted exclusively to those pedestrians boarding the train/subway car. And in crowded Taipei, there are a lot of people trying to board trains. As soon as the car doors open, they simultaneously drop their shoulders and try squeeze through.

Here's the issue: You're heading into the city and Taipei Main Station is your stop. You and everybody else in the train are bunched together in a cluster at the door, they slide open and you're met by a frenzied group of juggernauts that have no regard for you, each other, or anything but the inside of that train. They can't put it together that the train passengers need to "alight" before they can get on. But they try to make it happen anyway.

So the typical situation is you standing in the doorway with nowhere to go. You are a stone in rapids, a rioter against a fire hose, Simba against stampeding wildebeests. Frozen in place, catching shoulder after shoulder to the chest until somebody realizes that if people get off, there will be more room on the train.

What may be even more obnoxious is that it also happens on a smaller scale. In my building, when I take the elevator down to the 1^st floor, where it's quite obvious that I'm getting off, I'm never surprised to be in a 1-on-1 battle with somebody who insists on getting in the elevator before I get out.



To be fair, I don't think everyone in Taiwan does this.