Saturday was the first time I drove in Taipei. My girlfriend agreed to let me drive to the movie district of Taipei so I could get some practice behind the wheel. We have a friend flying into town on the same weekend that she is leaving on a business trip and I wanted to use her car to pick them up from the airport and take them to their hotel.
It takes a little while to get use to how different it is to drive in Taipei then in California where there are no scooters, no two way roads that are only big enough for one way traffic and there are parking lots next to every shopping center.
The first problem I had was figuring out how to get the car out of the underground garage into the elevator and out to the street level without hitting any of the walls or letting in any of the hundreds of mosquitoes that were lining up on the dashboard of the car waiting to swoop in whenever I lower the window to try to work the controls of the elevator.
After I got out of the elevator I had to navigate down tiny roads that have cars parked in both directions leaving barely enough room to squeeze my car through. If another car came in the opposite direction I would pull to the side of the road to let them pass.
The craziest thing about driving in Taipei is dealing with all the scooters. Every time you slowed down for any reason it seemed like three or four scooters cut ahead of you and force you to stop as a line of scooters passes by you. When you stop at the light there are little designated boxes where the scooters are allowed to pile up in front of the cars. When the light turns from yellow to red there may only be one or two scooters that move ahead but after 30 seconds of waiting for the light it seems like fifty to a hundred scooters have piled up until a whole swarm of scooters are all waiting for the light ready to attack any car that comes in
there way. At many of the small intersections people will go before the light turns green and stick there cars out into the middle of the interaction in an attempt to get a jump on the light.
I cannot believe how people here pile up into bicycles and scooters in such a fearless manner. I have seen whole families two adults with a young child wedge in between them ride around on a scooters on major street in Taipei. Whenever you pass by the MRT (subway) station there are two rows of parked scooters stretching for several blocks.
One thing I do like in Taipei is that many of the light have a countdown to when the red light will change so you at least know when the light will change. Another strange thing is there are not stop signs at any intersections only lights that blink yellow cautioning you to slow down. All the scooters and taxi drivers in Taipei refuse to stop for any other car or pedestrians. Once I slowed down because there was two cars parked in the middle of an interaction due to crash and I had to step on the brakes as eight or nine scooters swerved in between me and the two cars like nothing had ever happened.
When we finally got to the movie district (Xi Men ding) I to put the car in reverse for about fifty feet to get to the one space on the street that was big enough for her car to fit in. Since I have never mastered the art of parallel parking she had to park the car. In California you are okay as long as your tire is touching the the cement that sticks out into the street, but it Taipei there is only the curb and the street. We spend about ten minutes moving the car back and inching it forward in order to make sure that both tires were only a few centimeters away from the curb. Then you have to press a button to pull the side view mirrors in until that are almost flat with the car to make sure they are not hit by scooters.
The movie district (Xi Med Ding) was full of teenagers and young people running in and out of the little movie theaters, restaurants and, food stands. The theaters offered several American movies and a few Asian movies. We decided to see New York I love you based off on the same idea of the film Paris I love you. The theater we sat in only held about thirty seats with a screen that was a little wider than a classroom blackboard. I thing that the only thing they do to English movies is add Chinese characters at the bottom so everyone can get an idea of what the dialog.
