This weekend, I did something I was a little terrified of doing at first: I learned how to drive a scooter. In the States, motorcycles and scooters have this rap of being too dangerous, alas, not many people I know have managed to get on the back of one to learn how to drive it. Here, if you’ve spent even an hour in a city or town, there are scooters everywhere. Every which way you look there’s a scooter to be seen, and it’s the most popular form of transportation next to public transport.
I will say this: if you want to see a city, hop on the back of a scooter and take a drive. Yesterday with a good friend of mine, we trekked from our apartments to the very south of Taichung to the 9/21 earthquake museum. It was a planned trip, but still with surprises along the way. For instance, the landscape of the inner workings of Taichung are filled with apartment buildings, scooters, buses, and bright city lights. About ten minutes south of some of the busier parts of the city, you are surrounded by nature. The view is amazing, not to mention a breath of fresh air filled with gardenias and other natural native plants.
In Taiwan, there are a few fault lines of which the island sits upon, and was also created by. It’s impossible to predict earthquakes, and the night of September 21st 1999, many Taiwanese awoke to the shaking, and then to the destruction of their neighborhoods. My friend, Rachel, and I sat in the earthquake simulator and to say the least, it frightened us and we were expecting it. Imagine not expecting a 7.3 magnitude earthquake!
The damage was irreversible in some areas of Taiwan, and to this day, the school at the museum is still in the same state it was the morning of the earthquake. Desks are thrown all over the place if they are in one piece still, the structure of the building collapsed, and the track is unstable and no longer usable. Almost 20 years after the earthquake, there has not been one to the magnitude and power of the 9/21 earthquake. The presence of the museum allows citizens to be educated about earthquakes, and just what to do is something of that magnitude happens again in the future.
