Somethings I find strange, part II

1. Seven Eleven and Family Mart:
It is unbelieveable how these stores can be everywhere. In almost every corner there is at least one of these. Also campus area has its own seven eleven. And it still remains a mystery to me what you really can buy from these stores, except drinks.

2. Things dropping from the trees to my head (or almost to my head).
Water, leaves, nuts, seeds and lizard. The latter is the one that missed. I'm grateful for that.

Somethings I find strange

1. Garbage and how to get rid of it:
Back home we take our trashes to a container somewhere in our yard and then, eventually, a garbage truck will come and pick it up. Here it is bit different. Garbage car comes every night. You can hear it coming, because it plays a catchy tune, like ice cream truck back home. Then, you pick up your trashes, go to the street and throw your trashes to the car.

2. Bed and its height:
Several people who have seen my bed have been thinking that it might need to be lowered. It seems that my bed, which is normal height at least when compared to beds I've seen in Finland, is very high when compared to bed used here.

... to be continued.

Tea, tea and tea

Tea, oh yes. If you don't like it, you won't survive here. I've been here now for a week and sofar I have been drinking mostly tea. While in Finland you can see lots of different soft drinks (and beer) for sale in shops and restaurants here the drink of choice is tea. And believe me, there is massive amount of different tea brands to choose from.

A good place to get your tea aer the tea booths and stores on the streets. Again, a vast selection of these. Luckily, there is also other drinks available if you get bored with tea. For example water is good option! =) However, also juices are available and also some soft drinks as well.

So far I've familiar with following types of tea (mostly iced): black tea, oolong tea, green tea, lemon tea, black tea with lemon, love tea, and pearl tea. All these can tehn be varied with the amount fo sugar added. Taiwanese tend to like their drinks quite sweet. And tea goes with anything. Breakfast, dinner, lunch, snack, sweet, sour or salty; your selction of drink would be (iced) tea.

I'm quite sure that I've drank more tea during the past 7 days than during my whole life before that.

Rain and Scooters

It rains today. During the night the wind was quite strong, and I quickly found out the worst part of living at the 7th floor; the wind makes unbelievable loud noise! I was bit surprised that I actually was able to sleep in that noise...

The rain is of course not nice, but I could be lots worse. Today the rain drops were most of the time very small, thus getting everything wet quite efficiently. However, also "normal" rain has been present, although I tried to avoid it and left to work bit later.

As I mentioned earlier (did I), the scooters are number one option of transportation here. There is huge loads of them and it seems that rain is not a problem either. People just wear a certain type of long plastic raincoats and off they go. It looks a bit funny, because I saw today several people wearing exactly the same kind of raincoat. Unfortunately, I did not have time to dig out my camera from my bag.

Oh, by the way. If you're disabled and need a wheelchair to move around, don't worry. There is a solution for you as well. I've seen couple of times this certain type of scooter with sort of "training wheels", although training wheel is not perhaps the correct term for them. This seems to be very convenient way to transport, as you're able to carry your wheelchair with you!

Kaohsiung, Part II

Ok. It seems that after a small culture shock (if it can be stated as such) I've settled in quite well. I start to learn some of characters and how to act in the restaurants and other such things that are quite essential in order to survive here. Sweating is what I hate the most. Air conditioning is what I like the most... =) Not, quite true, but almost.

It seems to be quite common that at least in smaller restaurants you get a small paper where
are the dishes are listed. Then you just mark what you want to have, take it to the counter and then, eventually your meal will arrive. This is extremely convenient for a person with extremely poor ability to read and understand the language. There's plenty of time to study the menu (and you can take one menu home, and ask your friends what the characters mean... this is how I do it).

Another funny thing when it comes to restaurants are the drinks. Namely, these tend to be free (that is, free ice tee). This is quite funny from Finnish point of view, since drinks tend to be the item with which the restaurants do their profits... Here they do it with the food, which, by the way, is cheap. I'll post better analysis on the food prices asap I've got more empirical data about this.

Traffic is one of things I was bit worried before I arrived. Many websites and books mentioned that the traffic is a total chaos. However, this does not seem to be true, at least from my point of view. There are, yeah, lots of scooters... believe me, you have not seen anything like it before, but the traffic is very fluent. Some references pointed out that traffic lights are just for decoration, but this is nonsense, people stop to traffic lights as they are supposed to.

Buses seem to have extremely good coverage in the city, but it seems that no-one uses them. They also have extremely good route and timetable information on the web khbus.gov.tw including e.g. a screen that shows where the buses are on each route at this very moment!

I'll rest my case here for now. Will return some other day and perhaps add some images as well. I'm not very good in taking photos, so have to see what I have got.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Part I

I arrived yesterday afternoon (local time). I'm well but a bit tired. I will post something else plus perhaps some images sooner or later. Be patient.

For some reason blogger thinks that I can read Chinese. It has just changed its ui's language to Chinese. I tried to look for the correct place where to set it back to English or to Finnish, but it is rather hard since I'm not able to read anything.. =(

HongKong!

I'm now waiting in HongKong international airport for my flight to Kaohsiung. So far everything has went rather well. I even got three seat for me in from Helsinki to HK. It seems that sometimes even I can be lucky.

I have really nice set of hand luggage. A backpack with an ice hockey helmet hanging from it and a smaller pack with laptop with its accessories and an extra keyboard. It's rather funny that no-one had mentioned anything about these.

It would be rather nice to see more of Hong Kong (which we'll do in December), but layer of gray, smoggish, fog is quite effectively blocking the view. However, there seems to be some mountains around the airport.

Preparing for Taiwan, II

Well...

After one hour more work, we managed to squeeze my suitcase to ridiculous 23,6 kg. Out of this I'm still able to dump so much that I do need to pay anything if the say something to me. However, I still do believe that the chance they would ask something is very small.

Carolina suggested as a comment for my previous post that there is special account for "sporting goods". There indeed is. You need to tell it when you book your flights. However, sport goods + all other stuff can not exceed 20 kilos total!

But. I've had my last pizza in Joensuu for very long time. I really tasted good. Somehow I still do believe that I'm able to find even better food from Kaohsiung.

Preparing for Taiwan

This evening we finished packing my suitcase for my trip to Taiwan. It seemed bit problematic and eventually we were not able to fit everything in. However, we wanted to check how much the suitcase has weight in it. We thought at it should not be a problem, but how wrong can a man be...

After weighting the suitcase couple of times, we ended up with 30 something kilos! That's quite awfully lot if you think that the limit is 20 kilos... Well, we ended up spending the whole damn evening while getting rid of stuff from the case. We ended up discarding stuff worth around 8 kilos.

Btw. equipment for ice hockey refereeing is about 6 kilos... it would have done life so much easier if I just would have discarded it, but somehow I just could not do it.