• Weather
  • Living in a country with no four seasons, you quickly understand how the term “Summer Break” comes about. Summer equates to weather warmer than Singapore. Now I can fully comprehend why everyone goes for summer holidays.
• Weekend crowds
  • If you detest crowds like yours truly, weekends are a bad time to visit Taiwan, avoid if the days suit you.
• Typhoons
  • July is simply a bad month to visit Taiwan, despite avoiding a typhoon by about a week, you miss out on the Hot Springs cause it’s simply too hot.
• Traffic lights
  • You learn that spoilt traffic lights are a common occurrence, and that 6 days after arriving, the traffic light outside your hotel remains spoilt. In Singapore, if traffic lights remain spoilt for more than 6 minutes, you would have avid “reporters” calling up all the news channels and posting the latest MMS to Stomp.
• TV Channels
  • There seems to be an infinite amount of television channels, totally dwarfing all the cable channels we have here. Turn on at primetime, and you get similar news on almost every other channel.
• Spectacles
  • It is cool to wear merely spectacle frames without lens. They call it fashion.
• Language
  • Translation can turn out to be comical jokes, just check out the various signs around.
• Night Markets
  • Delightful experience, but then you soon realize the unhealthiness of it all when you see the tonnes of oil that your food items are dipped in, and the amount of Carnation milk dripped onto your ice cold dessert.
• Cinemas
  • People living in Taipei are on par with Singapore when it comes to movies. In a small radius within the Xi Men Ting area, there seems to be a cinema at every corner.
• Milk Tea
  • Milk Tea must be avoided at all costs. A-V-O-I-D

This is part 1 of my Taiwan escapade. Stay tuned for more updates.