Day 5 reflections

Today was one of the most exciting and interesting days of the whole trip! Only today, instead of taking the tour bus to all of our destinations, we took public transport around Taipei the whole day, using the metro system in Taiwan. As I travelled to different locations through the Taipei metro system, I realized something striking about the Taiwanese. In Singapore, in places like elevators and crowded places, Singaporeans do not usually queue for buses or trains, but just try to squeeze in as quickly as possible, making movement difficult. But for the Taiwanese, in crowded places, they queue up nicely and orderly, and thus makes moving into the train or up the elevators easy. I feel this is also part of Taiwan's culture, and the Taiwanese are brought up this way, which is good, in my opinion. The public transport is also very similar to Singapore, with different train lines and more of less the same arrangement of seats in the carriage, with a few exceptions. Most of the train services, however, are underground in Taiwan, while in Singapore, train services are above ground. This is one fact I find quite interesting about Taiwan.

Also, Taipei is really quite a large place, as to walk from the metro station to our destination , we really have to walk quite a long distance, whilst in Singapore, stations are very close to each other, and to walk from the station to a destination would not take very long.

The Taiwanese are brought up well in terms of behavior in public spaces. I wonder if this would change in the future, while the economy continuously improves. Meanwhile, in Singapore, would the behavior of Singaporeans change in the future? I think it remind a question yet to be answered, and we will only know in the future.