A friend of ours was in a scooter accident last night. There is a bridge that runs parallel to the Taichung interchange which dodges all the traffic. You can go pretty fast and there aren't alot of other cars around. Somewhere around there he hit the front of a car. His collar bone is broken and he was badly concussed. For hours he couldn't remember what had happened and why he was at the hospital and he kept asking the same questions every five minutes. The helmet was pretty scratched up, and it totally saved his life. Now I b/tch about Taiwan's hospitals. He got moved from the first one because the incompetents there were confused about insurance issues. He wasn't moved as such - it was up to him to do it himself. So the lady of the car he hit took him up to the second hospital. The place didn't even look like a hospital from the outside, it was a scrappy mess, a dump. Reception was a tiny little desk with a nurse sitting there looking at a few papers. The foyer was filled with beds with people in them, mostly old people crashed out. Our friend was left waiting with us at the end of a corridor in front of a vending machine without pain killers for a couple of hours without anyone having told us what was going on. There seemed to be about three quarters of a doctor in the whole place. I don't know, maybe some hospitals in Oz are like that but all the times I went I was pretty much taken care of without being completely ignored . There was a bit of waiting sometimes but there were people there to at least explain what was going on. He's going back to the states in a few days to get some decent people to look at his shoulder.   ¶ 16:58