I think I know what it feels like to be illiterate. Every sign is in Chinese and I feel like an idiot. I know two characters. The one for Car (it sort of looks like a car) and the one for cell phone. It is three characters. I think you have to grow up speaking Chinese to learn to read and understand. The symbol for Baby is two characters in a row that together mean Baby. When one is alone it mean Treasure. Which I guess makes a little sense that a baby is Treasure^2. I asked what Car^2 meant but my host said it didn’t mean any thing.
In Taiwan travelers don’t rent cars to you take cabs. The chance that the cabbie speaks English is about 3%. I have two cards. One with the hotel address and one with the UMC factory address. I noticed that when I traveled with my Chinese coworkers the cabbies charge me more when I am alone. Plus, I was taken on the huge scenic tour of Tainan.
The fast way “BEEG short cut” take 30 minutes. It consists of driving on paved river embankments for about 15 miles. The small roads are exactly as wide as one cab. There is one road on each side of the river but traffic goes both ways on each road. They typical way that this works out is that one car pulls over into an area slightly wider and the other cars pass. When there is a mistake one of the cars goes into the water. This happened the second day I was here (not in my car). I found out later that this was the reason we were traveling on a totally different river.
Every small bit of land is used for farming. So what would be a small 160 acre farm in the US here in Taiwan is farmed by about 30 different farmers. Some plots are about the size of my backyard. A typical big plot is about 10 acres
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