Even after more than eight years here, it can still be hard to wrap my head around how small Taiwan is. It's really very tiny (they say it's about the same size as the state of Maryland). Today was my friend's birthday and I told her for lunch we could go to eat anywhere in the country...and it wasn't a joke.
Unfortunately even though it's so small, the train system needs to be overhauled, and the highways are just too crowded. This makes trips out of the city take much longer than they should. Not that I ever notice, because I still haven't adjusted to the small size, so I'm always getting places much sooner than I expected, even when traveling around Taipei.
It's also amazing to see how even people's thoughts on distance is different. For example in the states if something is half an hour a way you may advise them to take a city bus, while here if something is ten minutes away they will tell you to take a city bus. In America a commute over one hour each way might be considered far, but here a commute around 25 minutes each way is considered far. So the thinking is the same, just scaled down.
I was thinking about this during our walk today and it really hit me when we walked through National Taiwan University's campus. The campus is quite small by western standards, but when compared to the rest of Taipei it's gigantic. I'd even venture that the size of the campus when compared to the rest of Taipei, is larger than central park when compared to the rest of Manhattan. It's enormous, it takes up a huge chunk of the city and you could probably fit all the rest of the city's universities (of which there are many) into NTU's campus. It's mind boggling how so much land could be given to just a school, and yet even though I know logically by scale, it's monstrous, I still can't get myself to think that it's anything but small. I think I gave myself a headache today trying to rationalize how something could be both immense and miniscule to me.
Before I make my headache come back, let's talk about the picture. It's of a sign in front of the campus' pond. If you pay close attention you may catch the example of what they call "engrish" or "chinglish" the latter is more prevalently used here, but i can never bring myself to say it as it can kind of sound like something rude. However it's not really a great example as they just forgot to one word that is in the Chinese version, that word being "release." I do hope i find a better version of this phenomenon though, as I have an utterly amazing "chinglish/engrish" story i'd love to tell.
