Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Vices in Taiwan

In five months in Tainan at street level, I come across activites that might be called 'vices'. Here's the collection.

There are a certain number of homeless and beggars in Tainan like any city of 700K+ people.
























As a mathematician I feel gambling is a tax on the stupid, what really gets me is when the government supports the activity. Here is the Taiwan Sports Lottery, there are Lottery stores all over.



















How about sex toys? Vice or Virtue?



















I thought pornography was illegal but maybe it's just the hard stuff that is free on the internet. Or maybe everyone is reading Playboy for the interesting articles.
The playboys are on sale for $10NT($.33US).
























I don't consider beer a vice but I know some people do. I think this is my favorite Chinese singer, Ah-Mei.



















Feng Shui is just another superstition and waste of time and money(my opinion). Here we have a mirror at the entrance to a dormitory to prevent ghosts from coming in. We all know that ghosts can NOT make turns.



















Walking all the time gets me into the train underpasses all the time. So there are sometime leftovers of drug use. Littering is the least of a drug users problems.



















Model glue was used when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s. It seems to be as popular as ever. Huffing is nothing new.



















And then there's the legal drug Bing Lang, known in the West as Betel Nut. It deserves a whole blog entry, we'll see if I can get to it.


1 comment:

Paula said...

Most of the vices you list are also found here in the US. I'm trying to think of what we have that is comparable to Feng Shui. We must have lots of magical thinking going on in the US with the popularity of video fantasy games and fantasy movies such as Avatar. I'll mull that over. We have a glass attack cat in our entry way in Bellevue and a iron bull in our entry in Tucson...