January 2nd, 2014: Cheers, New Years!

Cheers to the new years! Or as they say in Chinese speaking countries, "新年快樂!" Contrary to my younger days and due to my current placement in Taiwan, I had the interesting experience of celebrating the crossover into the next year at Taipei 101. I'll say it now plain and clear: when you gather over two million people and stick them within a small radius around a giant skyscraper, you are bound to find out the true colors of the city's people.

To be clear about what I'm getting at, is that although I previously talked about about how well-mannered Taiwanese people can be. Within the claustrophobic crowds and tightly packed lines of people squishing their way towards a closer vantage point of Taipei 101, people were pretty polite. As our group of abroad students and company waited for the fireworks and the turning of the decade, we happened to be sitting near the edge of the crowds where many people would try and push through to get a better view. Overall, people would try to squeeze through the globs and circles of people sitting, and form tightly packed traffic jams. So here's a small quiz for you: guess who was the first to try and break through our small group to skip the lines?

Think of anything yet?

Well, it was the American (who loudly notified us of our inconvenience to him), as he stepped on some toes and some nerves as he trudged through an ocean of people. This is in comparison to the average Taiwanese who would accidentally bump into me and would quickly say excuse me first in Chinese, then upon realizing I was with a foreign looking group, then in English. Of course, this was not every Taiwanese, but on average when comparing the different representations of the different counties, the Taiwanese were more polite.

Another comparison I can think of was when our group went to a soup dumpling store, which had some dumplings with a kick of flavor!

  I noticed that the Chinese (or those with the thicker accents) mainlanders often spoke louder than the general populous. This pretty much lines up with what I noticed, when I was an intern in China a few years back: people are generally louder, less mannered, but just as vibrant. 

I look forward to eating more kinds of foods and seeing how the culture differs in Southern Taiwan compared to Northern Taiwan!