With 22 million citizens buzzing about its towns every day, Taiwan is a pretty busy island! Big cities offer several different ways of getting from place to place. You can find Taiwanese locals riding buses, trains and even their famous high-speed rail. Of course, the streets are crowded with cars in heavy traffic as well. An interesting note, however, is the number of mopeds, bicycles and scooters that share the roads with them. At any given moment, a fleet of several scooters can even outnumber the amount of cars on the road! As for me, however, I enjoy walking on the sidewalks whenever possible. Since I'm not yet able to read all of the Chinese characters on the public signs, walking gives me the chance to interact with local citizens more often to practice my Chinese speaking.
Big modern cities like Taipei and Kaohsiung have a subway system called the Metro Rail Station - or MRT for short. While this is a popular way for folks to travel throughout the city, my home city of Tainan doesn't have it's own MRT system yet. Because of this, motorized scooters are very popular here. The streets are speedy paths, and crossing them can even be a bit of a rush sometimes. I stick with my bicycle for short distance traveling and join the lines of other Cheng Kung University students biking on the narrow lanes reserved for us cyclists.
