Friday, December 5, 2008

A Fellow Drifter on Driving

Just wanted to point you all in the direction of a brilliantly (or should I say frightfully) accurate post about driving in Taiwan. It's written by a fellow foreigner who washed adrift here on the shores of this crazy island just over 3 years ago. Unfortunately, they don't give medals for that sort of thing...

Alex has been one of the sages I've relied on in the adaptation process here in Taichung. Plus, he's great company over Starbucks and Thai Food. After about 10 minutes into our first conversation, we discovered we spent a good portion of our lives within 15 minutes of South Orange County Driving Time from each other.

The only real difference? I'm a native, and he hails from England. At any rate... it's a great post, and as I said: frightfully accurate.

And before you click, here's a daily dose of the road here:




[Edit: These videos are too fantastic. Alex did the leg work to find and link these gems on his page... but I have to post them here. It seems so ridiculous to see this much lunacy in a 2 minute streaming clip... but this is just day-to-day reality.]



And this one has a great sound track:



And this will make you jump up and make a face something like O_O ...or maybe =-O
See for yourself:



This stuff just couldn't be scripted if they tried.
Check Alex's post for the reason behind the madness.

2 comments:

Gavin said...

Holy moly, i´m kinda sorry i watched that last clip! i drive a motorbike so i dont need to see those kinds of accidents, although i dont think i´d drive a bike over there! kind of a free for all.

Gabriel Allen said...

Crap...that last clip was too gnarly. The first one was pretty dang funny to me though.