Taiwan Taxi Ride (Taipei, Taiwan)
We successfully finished the project that brought me to Taiwan, and decided to celebrate by going to the Dinosaur Club in Taipei. It turns out that the Dinosaur is a dark, cave-like restaurant/bar with an interior theme consisting mainly of dinosaur skeletons. The beer arrives at your table in little mini-kegs, and the most common phrase you will hear all night is a chorus of "Bottom's up!". The food was good, too. Some times my hosts would tell me what the food was made of, like when Angela explained that the grey cubes floating in my soup that I had thought tasted like extra-soft tofu were in fact made from congealed blood. Some times they would not:
- "What is that?"
- "Try it. It is very delicious."
- "But what is it?"
- "It is very delicious. Just try it."
At this point in the conversation, you know you should be worried. However, this particular delicacy does not look like the crickets or locusts that the other people "in the know" from back home warned you about, so you try it and discover that it tastes something like calamari. Then they tell you that it was octopus suckers, which is somewhat of a relief because you were worried that it might have been beef testicles. I tell you: we just don't get to have fun like that with guests coming to visit North America.
But anyway, the actual point of this story is to tell how we [barely] made it to the restaurant in the first place.
Sammy from the Taiwan office told me that there are only two rules of the road over here. They are:
- Watch out for the scooters.
- Let the taxi drivers do whatever they want.
I can assure you now that his assessment was spot on.
While heading from the Taiwan office out to the Dinosaur restaurant, I swear that we were very nearly involved in three separate wrecks. I don't mean fender-benders, I mean three big wrecks. Wrecks that would have required the "jaws of life". There were probably about six little wrecks that we avoided by inches. Inches, I tell you! There were three passengers in the taxi, and we were all making the same sharp intake of breath right at the same time. I should mention that before I left on this trip, people from the office had been telling me that the airline that had been booked for my flight home was not a good choice since it had a pretty lousy safety record. Even so, I decided that the taxi rides were far more dangerous than any flight I might ever find myself on.
So: two things about the taxi's themselves -
1. They all have those little spinner knobs on the steering wheel so that the driver can make impulsive direction changes faster.
2. They do not have seat belts for people in the back seat.
The interesting point is that in all those high-speed near death maneuvers, there was but one single instance of someone blowing their horn at us. As Sammy had mentioned, the taxi's are simply expected to be driven like maniacs. The other drivers would not even waste their energy reaching for their horn button no matter how seemingly fragrant a traffic violation might appear to a North American. To Sammy's assessment, I would add one last item: if a taxi driver uses their signal light, it means that something truly spectacular is coming up. Assume the crash position.
Which finally brings me to the time when our taxi was trying to turn right at the upcoming intersection. We were in the second lane from the left at the time, but our driver pulls out to the leftmost lane just to pass a single car (which was moving at a good clip), so as to be perfectly positioned to make a right turn across the two remaining lanes of traffic, one of which is supposed to go straight through the intersection. Our driver shoots into a free space that is, in fact, only half free because a minivan-sized vehicle was already half-way into the same lane, and was equally rapidly taking the rest of the space. It is a Mitsubishi van, and I know that because the logo on the side was about a foot from my face as we started to make our move. The van driver, clearly understanding the rules of the road, backs off and lets us in without any of the flashing of headlights, blowing of horns, or firing of automatic weapons that we take for granted in the USA under such conditions. Once merged, we make an immediate right turn across at the final two lanes of traffic. The scooters scatter as we blow through.
We didn't get a horn during any of that. I don't even remember what we got the horn for any more although I'm pretty sure that my eyes must have been shut at that point.
17-July-2004 Taipei, Taiwan
We did make it to the Dinosaur. That's Sammy on the left. If the picture looks a bit fuzzy, I think it was due to the six mini-kegs of beer that our group consumed before it was taken. The highlight of the night came when our entire Taiwan office got together and sang a rousing rendition of "Hotel California". They got a round of applause for that!
My friend Sammy told me that drinking heavily is part of business culture over there. During the evening, he related to me a story about a job interview experienced by a friend of his. After introductions, his friend sat down at a table with the interviewer. Also on the table were two bottles of wine and a cup. The interviewer told him, "Drink all of the wine, and then the interview will begin." Apparently, those are the conditions under which the big deals are made. You need to be able to drink a lot with your clients and still function.
Sammy said his friend got the job.
It will be worth it in the end.
Wright Cyclone in full song.