Well let's address the elephant in the room first...how blurry the picture is. I debated using it or not, but I figured it's a good example of what I go through with most of my pictures. I will have a dog pulling on me so most of my pictures end up blurry and I have to either try again next time or just give up on it, even if it's a one time only thing. So please address your letters of complaint to my dog for this blurry picture and all the pictures you haven't seen because she ruined them.
The topic I want to talk about today is the....uhh...curiosity of Taiwanese people, especially the older generation. It is common for people to pass by a stand, shop, or restaurant and take a good hard look at what is going on there. On the surface this is fine, but usually this only occurs when there is a line in front of a place. Somebody may walk by a shop for years and never pay any attention to it, but once they see a line, they will walk all around that shop trying to see what is going on.
Again probably not a problem, but it can get quite troublesome during meal times when their are lines for restaurants and people are coming in and sticking their noses in all the foods and walking around the tables like a lost child before walking out of the restaurant and going back to their day.
This pales in comparison to the real problem, home invasions. For older Taiwanese it is nothing to walk into your home and just go through your things. Just this past week a foreigner friend of mine was cooking dinner when a neighbor whom she had never met, walked into her home. She proceeded to not just look around, but to open the pots to see what we being cooked and going through cabinets as well. No this lady was not suffering from dementia, she was just being "friendly."
Unfortunately we foreigners can usually be a lightning rod for this sort of behavior. For this picture in particular, I was sitting outside of this eatery when the gentleman saw me and had a look on his face like "oh this foreigner is here, i wonder what this place is like." So he walked in and looked at all of the dishes so closely as if he was the health inspector. Then in true Taiwanese fashion he walked to the kitchen part and actually looked in the pots and pans. He then left and went away.
No wonder Taiwan doesn't have restaurant health inspectors, it would be impossible to police all the strangers who come into places and just going around touching everything.
Bonus Update: Below is some extra content for premium subscribers...
You may notice this restaurant as the same one I used for a picture about how a short line caused by waiting for rice to finish cooking, caused many people to see the line and themselves get in line. Meaning that in a way restaurants are rewarded for slow cooking and/or service. Well if you will allow me to use "lines" to segue to my talking about Krispy Kreme drumming up hype by having two days of free donuts, thus causing long lines. Well they are now officially open for business and as hypothesized it worked. They now have long lines of people waiting to pay money for donuts.
