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.