An Accidental Weekend

So I was going to go to the tea farm last week, but then the typhoon came. There was a large earthquake a few years back and apparently all of the soil in Taiwan is now extremely unstable. As a result, heavy rain (aka typhoons) create massive landslides in the mountains, and other sorts of things that kill.

So the trip was postponed until this weekend, which was a three-dayer. We left Friday morning with the intention of coming back Saturday evening. We got on the...

Well, let me preface this. People are not excellent drivers in Taiwan. That is to say, when the traffic lights go from green to red, people in the "halted" lanes continue to drive through the intersection for 2-7 seconds. That is also to say that before the lights go from red to green, people in the "waiting" lanes tend to be at least halfway through the intersection.

Okay. So really, maybe Taiwanese drivers are especially excellent because I have never seen any accidents - until this week.

I was going to work on Thursday, obeying traffic lights on my landlord's bicycle, when a car running a red light hit a girl on a scooter jumping the gun on the green. She slid perhaps fifteen feet, laid on the ground for a minute, and stood up. The driver of the car opened his door, got out (but did not come out from around the door) and asked if she was all right. She seemed like she was in fact still alive, and upon the establishment of this the driver of the car, a young professional looking type, helped her upright her scooter and walk it to the side the road. At this point he got in his car and drove away. No exchange of information, no yelling, no nothing. I was stunned.

Right. So fast forward to Friday morning. We get on the freeway and I am sitting in the back seat with tea shop lady's older sister trying to explain the bath houses in Korea in Mandarin, and just when I succeed and everyone laughs with joy, our celebration is interrupted by somewhat hysteric bursts of shrieking from the driver of our car. I am not wearing a seat belt because, one, it does not work, and two, older sister explained that people in Taiwan do not wear seat belts in the back seat - they are not necessary.

It turns out she was right. I think I looked up about three seconds before we hit the car in front of us. It took one second to realize that it was going to happen. It took another second to slide as low as possible into my seat to avoid whatever might have happened. And then about a half second of waiting for the inevitable.

No one was injured: I think we were probably going 25 or 30 when we actually hit the car, and no one was caught off guard thanks to the shrieking. But the car in front of us had a detached muffler and the rear wheel wells were rubbing quite hard up against the rear tires. Our car had a severely bent hood, and all the lights and bumper were completely destroyed. I think if we had been going even a mile or two per hour faster the radiator would have been smashed. But as it was everything under the hood just compacted a bit, and the car was able to run. The two drivers of the cars, both ladies, hugged each other and we continued on our journey. Though, it had to be cut short by a day.



The tea farms did not care that we hit a car and lunch still tasted good and in fact no one seemed to mind too much about anything at all.



We came back home that evening and I hung around the tea shop for a while as family members dissipated. Drinking tea at the massive, unitary piece of wood that serves as the tea table, I was less surprised than I would have been twenty four hours previously as I watched another car collide into yet another car, right outside the front door...