Tales from Taiwan 2011 Edition, part 4: Buses at 09:39

My Chinese character recognition has improved this week by 10 times the amount of characters. Booya! Consciously utilizing my synesthesia to learn new characters is really helpful. I've actually been speaking pretty little chinese, however, so my speaking skills have not improved.

8. The midi-ized bell tones just rang for the hour... but it's 11:20!

9. The escalators, and doorknob directions, are not consistent/correct. In America you'd be hard pressed to find an escalator heading away from you (i.e. that you can use) on the left of the one approaching. As for doorknobs, I guess they never heard of "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey", but I guess that's probably not as catchy in chinese as it is in english.

10. More about buses! There are several flavors of buses that I've experienced here, a much greater variety than just AC transit (new and old) and muni buses (electric and gas, and occasionally super old). So far, I have been on:

Upper-deck only, double seats with an aisle down the middle
4 sets of double seats in the back, standing room/four priority seats
Same as above, but with two priority seats facing the back
8 single/priority seats in the front, lots of standing room with plastic handles, double seats in the back
Only side-facing seats, less standing room

And there's probably more that I haven't seen.

People really respect the sanctity of priority seats here, to the point where young and capable people get on a bus and stand instead of taking a priority seat until a senior citizen gets on. Unlike the American way of doing it, which is "I'll just sit here until I see someone who needs it. Then I'll get up, no harm done to anyone, right? I'm just utilizing the space." But when I take the priority seats in the front (in the absence of old, handicapped, pregnant women and mothers with children), I get tons of stares that I only notice if I'm in a backwards-facing seat. But no one ever says anything, so suck it, passive-aggressiveness. Then again, I also get stares from dancing on the subway to my headphones. And singing. On a crowded car. But chinese people are just weird.

Lastly, this trip I've gotten over the fear of taking the bus in a foreign country. I mean, come on, I can't even read the stops or know where I'm going most of the time - I feel comfortable taking any random MUNI line in SF because I can at least figure out which neighborhood I'm in or where north is, but with the perpetual cloudy weather all week I have a very limited internal map because I don't know where north is. But I've used the bus pretty frequently, once or twice a day, and it's not so scary anymore. Especially because the taxis are so cheap here, compared to America, so no matter how lost I get it'll probably just cost six dollars to get back.