From Asia to Europe

To illustrate what driving in Taiwan might be like, I’ll select a question from my roommate’s written driving test (which he failed):

You slip and fall due to oil stain on the road, you must:

a) forget it and leave
b) report to the nearest police station
c) use tree branches or other signs to warn other cars

(answer: c)
(First, best of luck finding the tree.)

So you can well imagine that a country that encourages you to put more junk on the road might have, let’s say, ‘confusing’ signage.

Yesterday I had a 9-9 day, ending with 2 hours of Chinese class. At 9pm I was due to go to a colleague’s housewarming in the south part of the city, and planned to get there by scooter. It has been raining heavily for about a week, so the roads are slick and visibility is poor. (How’s that for building my defense?)

I followed my colleague’s hand drawn map across a bridge that splits into several lanes, for scooters and cars. As I was crossing the bridge in the scooter lane, I noticed the sign above me said ‘to Taipei City’ and the one next to it, ‘to Xindian City’ (my goal). I was convinced that I was in the wrong lane.

I did a full U-turn on the other side of the bridge to cross again, and then another to direct myself towards Taipei or Xindian City once again. Just before the lane split, I left the pack of scooters and sailed solitarily toward the Xindian City sign. I can’t quite place whether it was the frantic honking behind me or the widened lane that prompted me to giggle hysterically as I realized that I was driving my tiny 50CC onto the elevated highway.

My plan was to find the nearest exit and make a quick turn off. But while I was looking up, between raindrops, and staring at signs, I hit one hole… and then another. The second was the entire size of my scooter, half a foot deep and filled with water. Given that I was going 60km/hr or so, when I hit the inside edge of the hole, the bike flew up into the air and I went over the top of the handlebars. Miraculously, I held on tightly, and gravity worked its wonders, tossing me back down onto the seat along with bike down on two wheels.

(As passing Chinese motorists drove by, shaking their head and exclaiming, “What typically shitty foreign drivers!”)

I kept driving, feeling less amused about the whole ride, and ended up cutting across several lanes (yikes) to take a left exit off the highway. Driving was becoming quite difficult, so I pulled off to the side of the road to find that I had a flat rear tire. (More to put into this two-wheeled money pit!)

I called my colleague to pick me up and off I went to the housewarming, an hour and a half late but as if nothing had happened. The scooter will sit parked for a day until it’s ready to be dealt with on Thursday, after the national Dragon Boat Festival holiday today.

The experience wasn’t a total inconvenience – when I finally rolled the scooter to a stop, I found that I was sitting under the sign for TESCO, the English supermarket chain. Finally, after months of searching, I’d found it.

Incompetently, Laura.

Tags: Taiwan Living

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Taiwan Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.