Arriving in a new place is sometimes like eating a meal while taking a fragrant bath in a concert hall. It’s a joy for the senses.
There’s so much that’s unfamiliar combined with so much that’s familiar, but unexpected.
It was the sounds that were especially surprising when we arrived in Taiwan, and they continue to delight us today.
We moved from Switzerland where the background to our days was the sonorous echo of church bells, the less-pleasing wail of ambulance sirens and the regular swish of passing trams.
In Taiwan the first new sound we noticed was the gentle tune announcing the arrival of the recycling trucks each evening.
You can see a short video here (note the friendliness of the garbage man).
Rubbish collection is a big deal in Taiwan. It’s not just that recycling is taken very seriously: people’s trash is collected DAILY. To those living in the parts of the UK, where rubbish is collected once a month, that must seem like a typo.
It’s not. All our trash is taken away, pre-sorted, every day.
Recycling redefined
The Taiwanese approach to recycling is even more thorough than we experienced in Vienna, where it feels like there’s a recycling centre on every street corner, and off the scale compared what we saw in Switzerland.
In Switzerland, we found it almost impossible to get rid of anything. Despite the country generating so much rubbish, (Switzerland ranks fifth in the global waste index), we would have to walk miles to recycle bottles and metal, and then miles in a different direction to recycle textiles and plastic.
For larger items, everyone had an 400kg annual waste allowance at the city recycling centre. Once you got there though, you discovered that “recycling” actually meant “landfill”. Everything we took to the ‘Recycling-Hof’, no matter the condition, was simply crushed and dumped.
Even the weekly rubbish collection in Switzerland was a hassle. For two weeks one summer our bin was ignored while those around it were emptied. In the heat, the contents gradually became something of a bio-hazard, forcing people to cross the street.
When we phoned to find out why were being wastracised, we were told that a tiny registration number on the side of the bin had expired. Some of our neighbours suggested a solution for when this happens. They said they drive across the border and dumped their rubbish in Germany. That didn’t seem a good option though.
After a few years, we concluded that the money the Swiss save NOT collecting rubbish must be spent advertising to the rest of the world how environmentally responsible they were. How else t explain the difference between reality and the rhetoric.
An overture to begin each evening
In contrast, one of the evening highlights of living in Taiwan is the arrival of a small flotilla of garbage trucks, one for each type of waste. Their approach is heralded by a musical overture not unlike the tune played by an ice-cream van and it never fails to make us smile. As dusk descends people come together and chat, each with their rubbish pre-sorted and stacked into shopping trolleys. It’s like a visit to the supermarket, only in reverse. They leave with their trolleys empty.
There are many other sounds that punctuate our days.
Every few days, we wake to the sound of our local cardboard man. Across the city, these people work the streets endlessly, collecting cardboard. Each rides a three-wheeled motorbike with a large frame to stack what they collect. They all produce the same plumes of blue smoke and never move faster than a walking pace, puttering along while the driver makes a long deep wah-ah-ah-ah-ah sound, accentuated by the bumps in the road.
Every month, two men in a small blue truck do the rounds too, offering to do odd-jobs and repairs. A speaker plays a recorded list of what they offer: fixing window screens, repairing doors, or drilling holes, for example. But we think the cassette they use for the announcements must be a bit old and the tape a bit stretched. The tone is strange and the words are hard to understand. For months, our untrained ears couldn’t understand why two burly men in a van filled with sheets of plywood, plastic cables, pots of glue and nails appeared to be selling papaya salad.
A world of laughter and a world of fear
Buses make us smile too. Hurtling around a bend at high speed, being flung bodily from one side of the bus to the other, we press the stop button. The next second we are transported in our imagination to the spinning teacup ride of a children’s fun fair, as ‘It’s a Small World, After All‘ is played from the bus’s speakers.
As the bus hurtles to a halt, we find ourselves bobbing our heads and mouthing the words: “It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears, it’s a world of hope and a world of fear…..”
Our favourite sounds though are made by the trains.
Like most subway systems, the carriages in Taipei play sounds when the doors open and close. The stations also play a tune as the train approaches. In Taipei there’s a different tune for each subway line, while the southern city of Kaohsiung has a different tune for each station. The HSR bullet trains have their own music too.
In every case, the tunes never get tiresome, no matter how often you hear them. They’re uplifting. They make us smile and feel relaxed, knowing that the metro system cares about us and our journey.
On the trains, and in the stations, posters also show a small cartoon cat, called Maji Meow, who is there to remind us to think about the needs of others, or to remember not to look at our phones when we get on and off trains, and all this in a very touching, non-pushy, way. Don’t take a tumble like Maji, is the message.
Here are our four favourite metro line tunes.
The RED line is the one we like best. It’s very hard to say why.
The ORANGE line sounds like it was written by a visiting space alien.
The GREEN line is a funky jazzy Chopin-like piano piece.
The BLUE line is also an adapted piano recital.