| The "invoice lottery": In a brilliant ploy to get businesses to keep their transactions on the books, Taiwan has a bi-monthly lottery game, in which your numbers are printed on your receipts at cash registers. Unfortunately, your home becomes littered with them, while you wait for the next drawing. |
 This site for foreigners explains it much better than I ever could. |
| Taipei's "running man" in the cross walk | . (video coming soon....) . |
| The garbage experience: Every evening, you will hear music that sounds like the ice-cream man, but it's really the garbage truck. Run outside along with all of your neighbors, carrying their trash, recyclables, and compost bins. Listen to a story on NPR about this See a short video of this |
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| Fortune telling- This is a big industry in Taiwan, with competing schools of thought and psychic technique. Evija visited this guy to help determine when she will have children. This fortune teller uses what looks like a huge compass to divine the answers to various questions. He taps quickly around the outside of the round brass tablet, until the needle in the center tells him that the answer has been identified. His assistant on the left records the answers for analysis afterwords. |
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| My favorite customized scooter seen on the streets of Taipei |  |
| Exotic birds- I'm not sure that Taiwanese are any more enamored of pet birds than other Asians, but them seem to enjoy cramming them into tiny cages. It seems to me that since the concerns over bird flu developed, I much less frequently see bird sellers on the street. Additionally, all public buses now have signs that say "no birds". Here is my friend Frank with his pets  |
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| The smallest card game ever: it's kind of a cross between gin rummy and crazy eights, played with pH test strips :-) That's Jenny's aunt and uncle across the table. |
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| Odd street performers: I especially like that this guy wears a paper mask-- like a lot of people do when they are sick or want to avoid pollution-- but then he rips it open so that he can play. |
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| This guy looks like something out of Fat Albert. |  |