Funny thing about time in Taiwan is they don’t use the same standards that we do in the US. For example they love to use military time here and hate A.M./P.M. So unless you know how to convert it, your gonna have a hell of a time here. Let me help you figure out this simple math problem. Take the time it says and subtract 12, like if they say its 19:43, by subtracting 12 you would have 7:43pm, easy! They don’t like to use normal dates either. In Taiwan it is not the year 2005, it’s the year 94, why you may ask, well read this: Following the imperial tradition of using the sovereign’s Chinese era name and year of reign, official ROC (Republic of China) documents and most people in Taiwan still use the Min Guo (literal meaning: “The Country of the People” or in this case, “Republic”) system of numbering years in which year one was 1912, the date of the founding of the Republic of China. For example, Year 2005 is the 94th year of “Min Guo” (”94th year of the Republic”) or “Min Guo 94 in Chinese.

Pretty stupid, huh? Yeah I thought so too, but you gotta live with it. They are kinda stubborn here and won’t listen to my suggestion that it is stupid and they should change it.

Currency is another thing to get used too. They have no cents in their money, just dollars(thank god they call it dollars!) Oh but they still use coins and lots of em, their smallest bill is a 100 note, which roughly translates to $3USD, so be prepared to carry change if you visit here. One thing nice I must say is that everything on the shelves is tax included, so if you see a CD for $208, when you go buy it, it’s gonna cost you $208!

Well that’s it for todays lesson, that will be $18USD, please pay the cashier on your way out.
Teacher Frost-Out!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.