Trash Talk

Amanda over at Following an Unknown Path is doing an awesome series of posts right now called "Simply Taiwan" and her post about garbage collection in Taiwan, which made me want to post about it too!



Here's one of the videos she posted, which is great because the garbage system must really be "experienced". I really miss/appreciate the nice little system of leaving your garbage out and it magically disappearing by the afternoon!

Getting garbage is kind of a pain for me in Yilan because I either have class or am not there for any garbage collection time except for Tuesday afternoon, so if I miss one week, I'll have two weeks of garbage stinking up my house. The old Taiwanese ladies in my neighborhood always comment on how much garbage I'm throwing away, and chat away to me in Taiwanese, which I can't understand at all. But sometimes I can guess what they're trying to say.
In Taipei where I live, they are building an MRT station in the area, so they do garbage pick up, but you need to put it in city bags that you buy. We're moving to a different apartment now, so we've been doing a lot of packing and cleaning both at our place and at the place we're going into. We hauled a lot of old stuff downstairs yesterday, and it was taken away today already.

My two awful garbage memories are constantly running after the truck in Yuli because we lived on the third floor, and by the time we heard the truck coming around it was almost passing by!
The other was not getting out of the way in time when the truck compressed the garbage bags and getting splattered by unknown waste.... you only make that mistake once. Now I kind of throw the bag in and run!