This is What Happened: Tales from Taiwan, 2011 edition at 03:52

This is what IS happening? welcome to a special edition of TiWH as I write with brevity and lack of punctuation because I'm only able to access the internet via my kindle which is a terrible writing tool.

1. the words painted on the roads in  Chinese are ordered correctly, as in you will read it correctly instead of backwards like in the US. so you never get things like the chinese equivalent of Ahead Stop or Only Turn Right when you read it from top to bottom.

2. My grandmas first question upon recognizing me was of course, "Do you have a girlfriend yet?" Though I guess its an improvement that she mistakes me for 22 now instead of 12

3 The distribution of SIM cards/unique phone numbers is strictly controlled by the government-you need to have two forms of idetification, like many things in Taiwan, and it takes half a day to getr your number activated.  don't remember the process being so hard. Probably all this to deal with fraud companies with which I am familiar on a face-to-face level... it would be interesting if my actions two years ago somehow influenced this change. But thats a story for another time.

more to come!