Trip to Taiwan : Part II

Very asian, Taiwan is a great place to be at. Though its been just few days for me over herewhat I have observed so far is while going to office in a cab. It takes me 45 minutes to reach office andsome of the things that I have noticed so far, which kind of strikes me are

1) Most of the taxis are Camry, Merc, Galant...infact I guess they have the best maintained taxis in Asia or as compared to US.
2) All the two wheelers are scooty like (not even like kinetic honda which has much better power, there are almost no bikes. I wonder whether it to reduce the average speed of two wheelers.
3) Helmets are like a oval bowls turned upside down :)
4) On narrow streets with a speed limit of 40km/hr, taxi driver drives at 80-90 km/hr
5) They introduced Bullet train couple of days back just like what Japanese have, and it passes by one of my clients site. This makes bring them in the elite list of 6 countires having bullet/HiSpeed train.(Thier typical speed is around 240Km/hr)
6) They have Mandarin versioned name for everything, even for English company names. For example if you tell taxi driver that you want to go to UMC (United MicroElectronics Corporation), he wont understand, you have totell him that you want to go to "Lien Tien", which is the chinese version of UMC.

The very first thing that I needed in Taiwan was a cell phone, the US sim card showed signal, but I wasnt able to make any calls. I searched for local GSM service providers, but the problem was visitors cant get a cell phone sim card, unless they have ARC ie Alien Resident Certificate. Inspite of reading this on the websiteI went to the office of a GSM provider known as Chunghwa. It looked like a typical BSNL office lil bit betterbut the problem was no one knew English. Finally they managed to get one lady who pretty much understood what I wanted and she told me that I need a ARC in order to get a SIM card. I gave them my passport with an expression "THATS WHAT I HAVE". Instead of looking at my Taiwan Visa they kept on examining my US visa , and finally gave me a SIM card. :)Well this solved lot of problems for me.

Again no graphs for this blog.