The day after I got back from Hong Kong the typhoon came to Taichung. I basically stayed in my room for two days only going out for food. It was unnerving to hear branches breaking off trees etc but my roommates were like whatever. After it had cleared there was crap everywhere - branches and other bits of trees were all over the place. I finally got the battery for my scooter replaced. Scott and Jill leave tomorrow morning, for good, so last night they kept me out to join in the festivities. It was 10:30, so I had half an hour to get home, and I had thirty seconds to decide whether I wanted to go home, get sleep, and save money, or stay out a bit later, spend money, and end up sleeping somewhere else. Man I am not used to this dorm situation. I decided to go home, but just before I reached Tunghai, with 10 minutes to spare before the doors to the dorm closed forever, they called me and made me turn around and come back. I didn't mind though. But it was against my better judgement. We went to a new bar so it was half worth it. Then we went to FM where Jill got really drunk. I played with this thing hanging on the wall where you flick these round things and try to make them land in the Smirnoff bottle, like pinball. I got one in. Then I got busy reading the local expat literature. The Voice is sucky and blatantly politically biased although this one article with a photo of some slums hanging over a river near the train tracks down in the seedy part of town was interesting. The gap between rich and poor they said is pretty big in Taiwan. Then Scott came over and asked in a Russian accent why I was over there being antisocial and I told him about how I read "The Introvert Advantage" and how I was now "embracing my introversion."
At dinner there was this cool girl from the US who has lived here for years. She was in a scooter accident and you can see all the metal work in her elbow sticking out of her skin a bit. She got screwed over afterwards. (And here I am hoping I get compensated for the $200 I spent at the hospital!). Taiwan is like this: when you go to a mediating session to sort this kind of stuff out, rather than bring a lawyer, you bring your gangster friends. Lawyers don't do sh/t apparently. Then your gangster friends do a bit of a settlement and that's it. It helps to have cop friends too. So the moral of the story is, if you're going to ride a scooter on these psychotic roads, make sure you have a license and health insurance, or better gangster friends than the person that nearly kills you does.   ¶ 22:07