This was actually my second trip to Taiwan. The first trip a couple of years ago was vey brief and only for two days. This time I was going to be in Hsinchu for a week and then would be visiting Singapore for 4 days before coming home. I was looking forward to my visit in the hope of getting to know this country a little better.
I visited two cities in Taiwan, the mecca of semiconductor manufacturing and electronic companies Hsinchu and a day's trip to the capital city of Taipei. Hsinchu is a very small city primarily developed due to the presence of semiconductor manufacturing companies such as TSMC , UMC and the many "TEK" or "TEC" companies all around. My first impression of the city is a somewhat a cross between an American city and a messy typical Indian city. The place follows American standards of orderliness but probably not as spic and span and has the occasional water spilling on to the streets from a shop or some unruly shrubs lining the footpaths. Of course the sights and smell of non vegetarian delights are overwhelming - not so much a delight for my vegetarian friends, and to some extent even for me it was sometimes a little too overbearing ! The streets are also crowded with two wheelers , not too many motor bikes though, mostly scooties and everyone big or small , wearing the compulsory helmet.
Hsinchu is lined with innumerable eating places - and I really mean innumerable - there is some small outlet selling food at every step. Most of these places are not really elaborate sit and dining places though. A lot of them are just takeaway joints and others have a couple of small tables and chairs , though the prevalent system seemed to be taking away food in predesigned boxes. In between the food places are endless tea joints - not the kind of tea you have in mind - but exotic tea such as fruit teas, green fruit tea, bubble tea with milk and so many other variations of tea !! The signage is totally in Mandarin , so on the first day we relied on the pictures along with the writing to help us decide what to eat. I settled for a non adventurous chicken with rice dish from a very small joint which had a long queue and lots of people packing dinner boxes to take home. You could always find the familiar Pizza Hut or McDonalds or Starbucks all around as well if local fare didn't suit your palate.
I later found out that cooking is not something that most people indulge in. With the variety and abundance of eating joints, dinner was something carried home from these places , rather than cooked at home. I understood this phenomena and a little more about this culture further during my next couple of days at the office. Folks in the office (and this was not special about MediaTek, but seems to be a practice in all the companies around) come early morning into work , start the day with breakfast served in the office cafeteria , but usually packed and carried back to the desk. Then there is a set time for lunch at 12 noon to 1pm. The office cafeteria is full of people lining up in queues to the huge number of food joint options. There is a vegan stall which is a survival strategy for my vegetarian companions :) The lunch hour is ideally meant for eating and a short nap since lights are turned off during this time and just before 1, there is a soothing music that plays and wakes you up to the second half of the working hour. 6pm and dinner time starts with folks making a bee line towards the cafeteria again. Almost 90% of the work force has dinner in the office. After a point I couldn't help but ask some of my colleagues working there why they wouldn't go home for dinner and the answer wasn't very coherent or convincing giving me the feeling that I was asking very unnecessary questions and weekday dinners were meant to be spent away from home with office colleagues. This was independent of men or women really .. Not only this , there were many many colleagues of mine who stayed in Hsinchu through the week and would only go home (to Taipei or other towns) over the weekend which was designated as family time. There were a very very few exceptions who said they had to leave early (at 8pm ! ) as they needed to get home to help with young kids at home etc. I of course didn't get enough of my answers , so I prodded on to figure out what the children did and where did they fit in this picture. From what I understood most children would go to a day care post school where they would complete their homework, do exercise, play games, have dinner and then the parents would pick them up and take them home.
Even though I was shocked a bit initially at the way the whole system was set and how family time didn't really seem to play too much of an important part in the overall social fabric , I got to thinking of home and how maybe things really weren't so different here after all. Maybe except for the cooking part or the having dinner together part, our lives were pretty much the same of spending long hours in the office and having little time with family or children. But there was a difference - and I think the biggest difference is in the "acceptance factor". There was an overall acceptance of the work culture and very little demand from the home front for other time - basically there was no conflict of the "time and duties" at the work place versus your personal space. Even though I have also kept my children in the creche, I have also travelled extensively leaving my kids behind at home with a caretaker, I have continuously felt conflict and tension of how kids would grow up to be and whether this was the right thing to do and so on and so forth ! But that was not the case there and the acceptance also gave folks a wondrous sense of peace in a way. You didn't see folks walking around very stressed with all the hard work and long hours they were putting in, there was in fact a sense of fulfilment , a general sense of well being all around. That is what really hit me pretty hard.
Taiwanese folks seem to be in general a peace loving set of people. Not too many folks are religious either from what I could make out of my conversations with them. They were a hard working nation, focused and disciplined. The children started off early in life this way - I used quite a bit of public transport through my stay and did not find a single unruly child around - most of them were soft spoken , very disciplined , and seemed to be listening to their parents. But they didn't look subdued , on the other had they all looked very happy indeed full of child like mischief as well !
The other thing that I felt in the country, both in Hsinchu as well as Taipei is the safety levels. Given that I walked late nights back from the office or in general after dinner or on the MRT or on the roads in Taipei - not once did I have a creepy feeling or a general unsafe feeling at all which was pretty amazing. I read in an article later on that violence was almost non prevalent in Taiwan and it was one of the safest countries to visit. This was something I truly "felt" first hand. In my mind it was really a combination of two things - the people themselves seem to be a no-nonsense types keeping to themselves in general and also the law and order is very well regulated and maintained. In Taipei , we visited the Chiang Kai Shek memorial and also watched the change of guard at the place. I learnt that all Taiwanese folks had to go through a mandatory military service for a couple of years after college - I think that definitely added to their overall attitude of discipline and hard work at the work place and beyond. The military guards did seem very stern and not someone you would generally like to mess with :)
We took the HST (The High Speed Train) from Hsinchu and reached Taipei within just half an hour - the train travels at a top speed of 300km per hour. But the experience was more than just the speed of the train. We took the train on a Saturday , so it was very crowded, but while waiting for the train at the station, people automatically formed queues to enter the train and once it stopped, waited patiently for those inside to come out and then go in. This is something that we could learn from very well. Come to think of it, people even formed queues in front of the lifts during rush hours in the morning or in the evening at the office - there was a general sense of patience and co-existing with others which is a foreign concept to many folks in my dear country unfortunately.
Taipei is a lovely city. The public transport system is flawless - you have the options of the MRT, the public buses and the taxis which don't cost a bomb , so pretty useful in going from point to point. We didn't go up to the top of the Taipei 101 , which was once the tallest tower in Asia. We did have lunch in the food court though where there was a lot of local fare available including stalls selling several body parts of the pig including pig blood cake and other delicasies that I didn't have the stomach for :)
I also visited the city's largest flower and Jade market and absolutely fell in love with the countless shades of the orchids and exotic tropical plants and flowers. Not only were there plants and flowers on sale, but there were several handicrafts , pottery, furniture on sale too. For a person like me, it was paradise - of course I had limited means of buying or bringing back the stuff with me , so I had to settle for only a couple of knick knacks.
We didn't have much time to visit all the temples , but we did go to the Longshan Temple - it was just amazingly beautiful. The colour and carvings of the temple towers, the carvings of Chinese "angels" and "warriors" on the iron pillars and the colour everywhere was a different experience altogether. People went there to pray just like we do in our temples here - but the offerings would range from anything to a packet of sugar or biscuits to fruits and sweets and some special pineapple cakes. The arrangements of orchids and our homely champak were fascinating.
I also had the chance to walk around a local market at Hsinchu on one weekend morning and found it very amusing that the vendors were old men and women sitting on the sides of the streets just like at home and hawking their fares of vegetables or home made tofu , or several species of mushrooms that I wasn't even aware of , many exotic fruits such as the dragonfruit, rambutan, green gage, varied melons, huge guavas , grapefruit, and some others that I couldn't exactly place.
I tried my best to converse with anyone I could in the shops on the street - but conversations are a little tough as most of the local folks are not conversant in English at all - so you can make progress with limited sign language or with the help of Google translator in many cases. Taiwan in a sense is a much younger country given its political turmoil and history of the past and always having been under some colonisation - but the progress it has made over the last 5 to 6 decades the strides this country has made of progress and the kind of industries it can boast of are close to none other across the world. I am definitely impressed and I can't help but compare with my own country and why we can't seem to do more with the talent and work force that we have at home. I enjoyed my short visit and am looking forward to going again and visiting the smaller towns around the next time.
I visited two cities in Taiwan, the mecca of semiconductor manufacturing and electronic companies Hsinchu and a day's trip to the capital city of Taipei. Hsinchu is a very small city primarily developed due to the presence of semiconductor manufacturing companies such as TSMC , UMC and the many "TEK" or "TEC" companies all around. My first impression of the city is a somewhat a cross between an American city and a messy typical Indian city. The place follows American standards of orderliness but probably not as spic and span and has the occasional water spilling on to the streets from a shop or some unruly shrubs lining the footpaths. Of course the sights and smell of non vegetarian delights are overwhelming - not so much a delight for my vegetarian friends, and to some extent even for me it was sometimes a little too overbearing ! The streets are also crowded with two wheelers , not too many motor bikes though, mostly scooties and everyone big or small , wearing the compulsory helmet.
Hsinchu is lined with innumerable eating places - and I really mean innumerable - there is some small outlet selling food at every step. Most of these places are not really elaborate sit and dining places though. A lot of them are just takeaway joints and others have a couple of small tables and chairs , though the prevalent system seemed to be taking away food in predesigned boxes. In between the food places are endless tea joints - not the kind of tea you have in mind - but exotic tea such as fruit teas, green fruit tea, bubble tea with milk and so many other variations of tea !! The signage is totally in Mandarin , so on the first day we relied on the pictures along with the writing to help us decide what to eat. I settled for a non adventurous chicken with rice dish from a very small joint which had a long queue and lots of people packing dinner boxes to take home. You could always find the familiar Pizza Hut or McDonalds or Starbucks all around as well if local fare didn't suit your palate.
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| the many dumpling places that lined the streets |
I later found out that cooking is not something that most people indulge in. With the variety and abundance of eating joints, dinner was something carried home from these places , rather than cooked at home. I understood this phenomena and a little more about this culture further during my next couple of days at the office. Folks in the office (and this was not special about MediaTek, but seems to be a practice in all the companies around) come early morning into work , start the day with breakfast served in the office cafeteria , but usually packed and carried back to the desk. Then there is a set time for lunch at 12 noon to 1pm. The office cafeteria is full of people lining up in queues to the huge number of food joint options. There is a vegan stall which is a survival strategy for my vegetarian companions :) The lunch hour is ideally meant for eating and a short nap since lights are turned off during this time and just before 1, there is a soothing music that plays and wakes you up to the second half of the working hour. 6pm and dinner time starts with folks making a bee line towards the cafeteria again. Almost 90% of the work force has dinner in the office. After a point I couldn't help but ask some of my colleagues working there why they wouldn't go home for dinner and the answer wasn't very coherent or convincing giving me the feeling that I was asking very unnecessary questions and weekday dinners were meant to be spent away from home with office colleagues. This was independent of men or women really .. Not only this , there were many many colleagues of mine who stayed in Hsinchu through the week and would only go home (to Taipei or other towns) over the weekend which was designated as family time. There were a very very few exceptions who said they had to leave early (at 8pm ! ) as they needed to get home to help with young kids at home etc. I of course didn't get enough of my answers , so I prodded on to figure out what the children did and where did they fit in this picture. From what I understood most children would go to a day care post school where they would complete their homework, do exercise, play games, have dinner and then the parents would pick them up and take them home.
Even though I was shocked a bit initially at the way the whole system was set and how family time didn't really seem to play too much of an important part in the overall social fabric , I got to thinking of home and how maybe things really weren't so different here after all. Maybe except for the cooking part or the having dinner together part, our lives were pretty much the same of spending long hours in the office and having little time with family or children. But there was a difference - and I think the biggest difference is in the "acceptance factor". There was an overall acceptance of the work culture and very little demand from the home front for other time - basically there was no conflict of the "time and duties" at the work place versus your personal space. Even though I have also kept my children in the creche, I have also travelled extensively leaving my kids behind at home with a caretaker, I have continuously felt conflict and tension of how kids would grow up to be and whether this was the right thing to do and so on and so forth ! But that was not the case there and the acceptance also gave folks a wondrous sense of peace in a way. You didn't see folks walking around very stressed with all the hard work and long hours they were putting in, there was in fact a sense of fulfilment , a general sense of well being all around. That is what really hit me pretty hard.
Taiwanese folks seem to be in general a peace loving set of people. Not too many folks are religious either from what I could make out of my conversations with them. They were a hard working nation, focused and disciplined. The children started off early in life this way - I used quite a bit of public transport through my stay and did not find a single unruly child around - most of them were soft spoken , very disciplined , and seemed to be listening to their parents. But they didn't look subdued , on the other had they all looked very happy indeed full of child like mischief as well !
The other thing that I felt in the country, both in Hsinchu as well as Taipei is the safety levels. Given that I walked late nights back from the office or in general after dinner or on the MRT or on the roads in Taipei - not once did I have a creepy feeling or a general unsafe feeling at all which was pretty amazing. I read in an article later on that violence was almost non prevalent in Taiwan and it was one of the safest countries to visit. This was something I truly "felt" first hand. In my mind it was really a combination of two things - the people themselves seem to be a no-nonsense types keeping to themselves in general and also the law and order is very well regulated and maintained. In Taipei , we visited the Chiang Kai Shek memorial and also watched the change of guard at the place. I learnt that all Taiwanese folks had to go through a mandatory military service for a couple of years after college - I think that definitely added to their overall attitude of discipline and hard work at the work place and beyond. The military guards did seem very stern and not someone you would generally like to mess with :)
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| Chiang Kai-shek Memorial at Taipei |
We took the HST (The High Speed Train) from Hsinchu and reached Taipei within just half an hour - the train travels at a top speed of 300km per hour. But the experience was more than just the speed of the train. We took the train on a Saturday , so it was very crowded, but while waiting for the train at the station, people automatically formed queues to enter the train and once it stopped, waited patiently for those inside to come out and then go in. This is something that we could learn from very well. Come to think of it, people even formed queues in front of the lifts during rush hours in the morning or in the evening at the office - there was a general sense of patience and co-existing with others which is a foreign concept to many folks in my dear country unfortunately.
Taipei is a lovely city. The public transport system is flawless - you have the options of the MRT, the public buses and the taxis which don't cost a bomb , so pretty useful in going from point to point. We didn't go up to the top of the Taipei 101 , which was once the tallest tower in Asia. We did have lunch in the food court though where there was a lot of local fare available including stalls selling several body parts of the pig including pig blood cake and other delicasies that I didn't have the stomach for :)
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| Taipei 101 from a distance |
I also visited the city's largest flower and Jade market and absolutely fell in love with the countless shades of the orchids and exotic tropical plants and flowers. Not only were there plants and flowers on sale, but there were several handicrafts , pottery, furniture on sale too. For a person like me, it was paradise - of course I had limited means of buying or bringing back the stuff with me , so I had to settle for only a couple of knick knacks.
We didn't have much time to visit all the temples , but we did go to the Longshan Temple - it was just amazingly beautiful. The colour and carvings of the temple towers, the carvings of Chinese "angels" and "warriors" on the iron pillars and the colour everywhere was a different experience altogether. People went there to pray just like we do in our temples here - but the offerings would range from anything to a packet of sugar or biscuits to fruits and sweets and some special pineapple cakes. The arrangements of orchids and our homely champak were fascinating.
I also had the chance to walk around a local market at Hsinchu on one weekend morning and found it very amusing that the vendors were old men and women sitting on the sides of the streets just like at home and hawking their fares of vegetables or home made tofu , or several species of mushrooms that I wasn't even aware of , many exotic fruits such as the dragonfruit, rambutan, green gage, varied melons, huge guavas , grapefruit, and some others that I couldn't exactly place.
I tried my best to converse with anyone I could in the shops on the street - but conversations are a little tough as most of the local folks are not conversant in English at all - so you can make progress with limited sign language or with the help of Google translator in many cases. Taiwan in a sense is a much younger country given its political turmoil and history of the past and always having been under some colonisation - but the progress it has made over the last 5 to 6 decades the strides this country has made of progress and the kind of industries it can boast of are close to none other across the world. I am definitely impressed and I can't help but compare with my own country and why we can't seem to do more with the talent and work force that we have at home. I enjoyed my short visit and am looking forward to going again and visiting the smaller towns around the next time.
