Events in Asia thread...

[RollingWave]

every region is somewhat different, taiwan doesn't have a true monsoon season (it just kinda rain all year long ) but we do rain more in the may to june period usually.

typhoon season can last most of the year too anyway, it's usually concentrated in june to august but anything from april to even november is possible. so far this year there hasn't really been much typhoon in Taiwan, everyone of them seem to end up elsewhere.

Yeah when I was at florida I was shocked at how many wooden houses they were building on the coast, that seems like the dumbest idea ever. (or rather, the greatest idea ever for construction companies! )

[RollingWave]

Got any Pics of life around there by you RW? I dont mean personal pics. You know the buisness district, urban areas as opposed to others, etc etc.

well Taiwan is an.... unregulated place... to say the least... people kinda just built however you like so it's often a odd mess.

for example a few blocks away from where i live.... hey an apartment store and lots of modern looking apartment.. right?




but if you turn 180 from where i stood when I took this pic...




not exactly a model of urban planning there heh. notice how pretty much every house in this picture is a shop + residence? that generally sum up Taiwan most of the time.



as you can see, a lot of folks just build shacks onto of their house.. it's ... not clearly illegal... but not clearly legal either


and of course all kinds of commercial plasters everywhere... errrr.. i'm not sure if all the deregulation folks would really like it if their neighborhood is suddenly filled with adds like this



this street outside a local elementary school (the wall to the left) is a normal street by day but turns into a night market most nights... though today it's not open because of a pavement works.. hence why a lot of folks wondering around ...

it usually looks like this at night.



these stands can sell basically anything ... (ok you can't sell guns / drugs / sex... but pretty much everything else is ok)... it's often considered the final contingency plan for anyone... aka no matter how down trodden you end up you probably can make a living with a night market stand.. the cost to setup is very low while profits vary, but most make ends meet just fine... so it attracts folks from almots all walks of life and back ground... bankrupted busniessmen, middle age unemployed. kids just starting out.. mobsters that want to leave the underworld... multiple generation stands... you name it.

In fact, this local one even attract this guy.



yes, your eyes aren't mistaken, a white guy setting up a food stand in a Taiwanese night market? this guys is actually quite interesting... seing that he's a polish dude that spent most of his youth ummm...riding a WW2 motorcycle from Poland to the pacific... he even lived with the Talibans for a period of time..... but for some inexlipcable reason (aka getting married ) he now settles in Taiwan and make a living selling Polish cake... you'd understand why they make a documentary about it

[MMC]

Awesome Pics RW.....kinda gives people a perspective of how things are over there. I am sure Chicago has some areas like that on the SouthSide. Where you turn around from Skyscrapers and then are looking at an area of shops and or buildings turned into Homes. Plus China -Town is on the South-Side of the City.

Whats the Earthquake Situation like?

[RollingWave]

it quakes pretty much every month, but most you don't feel much if at all, though our tolerenace level is pretty high anyway, it takes a pretty strong one to really scare us. we havn't had a deadly quake in over a decade. that one was 7.3 Mw (in comparison, the 1989 San Fran quanke was 6.9 Mw ) but that one was REALLY bad, (it killed some 2400 + people!) . though since then most new buildings are of much higher earth quake proof standard. that one came right at the end of our boom era where we were a lot like China today. aka having most of the flashy stuff but a lot of the underlying saftey and infrastructure was garbage.... in short it's pretty much the same as San Francisco, normally you don't feel much and get use to it, and hope your building's strong enough when the big one hits.

[Captain America]

I went thru the same experience recently and all I can think of is my Mom's words.....on she didnt want to be there, was uncomfortable and wanted to go home. To this day I felt that those in the hospital and rehab should have been more upfront with us as they knew what they were seeing. They also pretty much knew what time she had left. In the end she couldnt deal with the pain. Let them drug her out just like putting an animal to sleep. She couldnt even function and worse she couldnt even communicate anymore.

All I know is if I could go back and my mother told me she wanted go home, could do it all over again.....then I would have did what she asked and then No one would have stopped me, and that would have included any other family members.

My same experience EXACTLY! They just "kept her comfortable" until they could suck it dry. And, fact is, she wasn't THAT comfortable. The drugs had her hallucinating, nightmares, stole her mind. Scared her to death.

Put her down like an animal, they did. I couldn't have said it better myself.

[MMC]

it quakes pretty much every month, but most you don't feel much if at all, though our tolerenace level is pretty high anyway, it takes a pretty strong one to really scare us. we havn't had a deadly quake in over a decade. that one was 7.3 Mw (in comparison, the 1989 San Fran quanke was 6.9 Mw ) but that one was REALLY bad, (it killed some 2400 + people!) . though since then most new buildings are of much higher earth quake proof standard. that one came right at the end of our boom era where we were a lot like China today. aka having most of the flashy stuff but a lot of the underlying saftey and infrastructure was garbage.... in short it's pretty much the same as San Francisco, normally you don't feel much and get use to it, and hope your building's strong enough when the big one hits.

Yeah when I was out west and there for a bit I was little bit more receptive of the tremors. Still the first time i experienced a shaking was in the night when i was a sleep. I woke up thinking the place was being raided.

[RollingWave]

well i must say that 7.3 quake was the only time in my life where an earth quake really woke me up, i manage to sleep through just about anything else

[Peter1469]

Funny you mention that. My mom, rest her soul, spent 2 months in a hospital at the end of her life. She told us all her life she didn't want to go out that way. They kept her alive long enough to totally deplete here assets and maxed out her Medicare benefits, before sending her to the hospice to die. My brother said almost a quarter million was billed to the government.

Not saying I was in a hurry to see the old girl go but therein lies a serious problem.

Sorry for your loss. Agreed.

[RollingWave]

Well, the PRC government seem to be taking advantage of while the worlds' mostly focused on the Olympics, they try to quickly go through the trails of Gu Kai Lai (you know, the girl that killed James Bond... errr I mean a MI6 connected shady Brit) and also another big shot political figure, (the ex railway minister who seem to have taken huge advantage of China's epic railway boom)

Gu admitted to the charges, and Chinese political show trails are usually really quick, most folks don' think she'll be executed though, but this is China so who knows. The general guess is that they fear Gu and her husband will go all out and blow up so much dirty secret that the party will face a huge crisis if they were to be executed etc...



meanwhile, after 20 years of Taiwanese investing in China, amazingly only yesterday was there actually an agreement on investment protection, since Taiwanese are regarded by China as "not foreigner" ... but also "not citizen" ... the obvious self contradiction has caused Taiwanese folks on the mainland to often be at a huge disadvantage whenever they are involved in legal dispute (in a land where legal rules were already somewhat weak to began with). thus we sometimes see cases where say.... a Taiwanese company signs a 20 year lease on a land and builds a huge department store... but then 5 years later the landlords demand a huge rent raise and refuse to honor previous written contracts etc... (usually in such situation the general method for our investors would be to try and bribe an official to slam down on that landlord ....) hopefully with this deal FINALLY in place the situation will improve somewhat

[Trinnity]

Interesting, RW. Thanks for filling me in on this.