Observations

• Upon first landing in Taiwan, there isn't a cheesy large "Welcome to Our Country" sign¹, however there is a large sign telling you that "Drug traffickers will be prosecuted by death." If this doesn't say how seriously this country takes its law offenders.

• After riding the gritty New York subway daily², I can't believe how amazingly shiny clean the Taipei subway is. Not only that but people actually wait in lines to board the trains and they actually wait for people to get off the trains before getting on. Plus the subway is either gimmicky to the daily riders, or actually like English speaking tourists because there is signage in English and an English speaking voice telling me the next stop of the train. Little details like arrows on the walls showing the next 3 stops of the trains, and the ghosting of the last station the train was on, leads me to have a better understanding of the trains here and where they're going than in the city I live.

• There might be a reason why the subway is brand-new clean and I believe it is related to the drug trafficking being punishable by death--- because I was forced to spit out chewing gum by a police officer. I nearly cried, for fears of being caught and the cane.

• Part of the reason why I believe everyone is smaller here was discovered in a food court. The food vendors hawking plastic food (that makes it easy for the foreigner to point to what they desire) do not serve or sell drinks. No one (besides the other white people I saw) had any type of beverage on their food trays, nor did they seem to think anything was missing. Hell, when I mentioned my incredible thirst to F's mom, she actually is worried that I drink too much liquid.

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¹ Okay, there was an extremely cheesy song and video on the airplane telling me how "Taiwan will touch my heart". (The link to the cheesy song might be here, but like many websites here-- I can't seem to access it without something resembling a 404 error.)

² A subway that is covered in scratched-in graffiti on the windows and a certain dirtiness that can't go away with heavy applications of bleach. Actually right before we left, we were apart of a crowd ooohing and awwing over a shiny new subway that was still being tested. The difference between the new one is merely the fact that it looked clean and not harmed by the hand of taggers. (I still can't believe that the subways used to look worse.)