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!
Showing posts with label kaohsiung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kaohsiung. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007
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.
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.
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