A friend of mine from my childhood still teases me about something I said when we were kids. We had been playing in the neighborhood and I wanted to sit down for a breather. I looked around and said “Where are your benches!?” My friend still finds this quite funny that I would think everywhere should have benches.
I had a similar experience in Taiwan, but replace “benches” with “trash cans.” In the city there are practically no trash cans. The main reason for this is because there are such strict rules on garbage and recycling that if there are public trash cans than people will just dump all their things there instead of properly separating and disposing of their garbage. But of course this is very inconvenient and results in people either walking around with trash in their hands or most often just throwing it on the street.
This affects me in one big way…my dog’s poop. I am one of the few people in Taiwan who actually pick up their dog’s poop. But with no trash cans around this means I’m walking around with a bag of poop for awhile, especially if we are going someplace like hiking, or to get some food or a shop (yes dogs are allowed in local shops and food places). So the way I get rid of my dog’s poop is that I have to bring it home, and then I put it in this trash can that is out on my tiny partially enclosed balcony.
Having a trash can full of bags of dog poo means that you are going to get one thing, flies. Not only does my balcony have flies, but they lay their eggs all over the trash can, so usually it is covered with fly eggs and larva crawling around. These flies attract another thing, spiders, so the balcony has a lot of spiders, which thankfully are just normal house spiders and not the huge hairy as big as your hand spiders that Taiwan has. It all sounds nasty, but for the most part the flies can’t get into the house and the spiders do keep them under control, and the smell doesn’t really get into the house either.
There is one nasty part however. Whenever it gets full enough to take out the trash, I will also clean out the trash can to help reduce the number of flies. Let’s just say for most people having fly larva and spiders crawl on you would be torture. Thankfully I don’t care about that, it’s more the smell when bagging up the trash that gets to me. I don’t know what’s going on inside of my dog’s body, but it’s pretty unholy if that is what is coming out of it.
