• burping — Sure, it's a cultural thing, but the sensitivities of cultural relativism notwithstanding, it's too gross and prevalent to excuse. From across the room in a five star restaurant to beside a back alley street vendor you're bound to experience a liquid sounding, noxious smelling burp with no "excuse me!" in sight.



• cuteness — There's a cultural aesthetic of "cuteness" here that drives us crazy. It's a widespread aesthetic (e.g. toys fashioned in the likeness of poo, all Hello Kitty products, Bichon Frises wearing diapers), but applied specifically to girls/women, it's hugely annoying. Forget trying to be beautiful, classy or sophisticated, just act "cute!" We often see women our ages and older pouting, whining, cajoling and otherwise acting like spoilt brats - all qualities of "cuteness" in Taipei.



• dog shite — Piles of it litter the sidewalks. You can't walk ten feet without dodging a pile of it or avoiding a fly-coated smear of it. People always mention Paris in the same breath as dog shite and sidewalks, but it has nothing on Taipei.



• drivers — This almost goes without saying.
  
  
  
  • cars — Car drivers are bad. However, there's probably nothing malicious about their driving tactics, they just want to get from point A to point B. They have their eye on the prize and nothing much is going to prevent them from getting in front of whomever or whatever is in front of them. Basically they have no regard for anyone or anything beside themselves. It's no big deal if a traffic light turns red and a few drivers decide to race through the intersection while traffic is advancing on the green. The drivers on the green will just weave their way through the intersection. If I had to drive in this city I'd probably end up driving the same way. Fair enough - but - still annoying when we're crossing the street and almost get run over on a daily basis. A confession: I've had fantasies of taking a kryptonite bike lock or something and smashing the hood or trunk of the cars as they race by. The worst I've done is flip the bird, but I'm not ruling out more satisfying responses.
  
  
  
  • buses — Bus drivers are lethal. They're a case study in Ying and Yang. On one hand they froth with overt road rage, and on the other hand they seem entirely indifferent to everything around them. They're kind of like the guy at work you're not quite sure about. One day he could show up to work in a short sleeved, pressed white shirt, pour himself a cup of coffee, read the newspaper, chat it up for a while, and then blow away everyone in the office. No flipping the bird at bus drivers.
  
  
  
  • scooters — Scooter drivers are truly annoying. Taipei has a population of about three million people and every man, woman, and child rides one. They're ridden on roads, down alleys, on sidewalks, in pedestrian only zones - everywhere. There are no rules of the road when it comes to riding a scooter. Traffic on the road too congested? Just plow your way through the crowds on the sidewalk. Don't feel like waiting for the light to change? Just go. Can't find a parking spot? Just move someone else's and park yours in its place. I'm sure we often hear, "Dude, where's my scooter?" in Chinese without knowing it.
  
  
  
  
  
• drunk business men — We live in the "Combat Zone." The narrow alleys and streets around our apartment are filled with pubs, caberets, and KTV (karaoke) clubs. It's the place to come if you're a business man looking to grease the wheels of a deal with some cheap booze and a quick "massage." They drink long and hard and they're not afraid to show it.



• early risers — There's an old guy who rides a battered motorcycle slowly up and down the block in the early morning yelling into a megaphone. He's rigged some kind of cage onto the back of his motorcycle and it's always piled high with flattened cardboard. We think he's a cardboard collector — but why he collects it at 4:30am when no one is awake is a mystery.



• fire crackers — More specifically, the seeming randomness of setting off thousands of them in one go. It can happen anytime and anyplace. On more than one ocassion we've been stopped dead in our tracks by machine gun fire issuing from hidden recesses. Technically more unnerving than annoying.



• greetings — You know how it is when you walk into a store and someone working there greets you? Like, say you walk into a GAP. It's a given you're going to be greeted by someone wearing a headset folding polo shirts. I'm sure most people just tune it out. Not possible here. Whenever you walk into a store you're blasted with a long, grating, and complex greeting. It follows the same arc as an air-raid siren: a slow cresendo building to a whining, nasal climax followed by a slow, steady decay.
  
  Almost every store has an entrance chime that sounds when you cross the threshold. No matter where they are in the store or what they're doing (serving other customers, stocking shelves, folding polo shirts, talking on the phone, or taking inventory in the storeroom), when the chime sounds they employees will all crank up their voice boxes and just let it rip en mass, "Waaaaaaaiiiiiiiiii Gwonnnng Ling! BlahBlahBlahBlahBlah." It's so annoying that we've had to boycott some stores where the staff is too overly enthusiastic about greeting customers.



• mobile phones — What can I say about them that hasn't already been said? In the wrong hands they're extremely annoying. A few examples: the guy playing games on his mobile with the volume cranked up in a movie theatre during a movie (To think you thought the slow crinkle of candy wrappers was as bad as it could get.); the blind woman talking loudly on her mobile while "exercising" on the elliptical trainer at the gym while people are waiting to use the machine; the eight year old answering his phone and then starting to talk - in Chinese (I might have let it go if he was speaking English) - in the middle of a quiz.



• mosquitos — We have a lot of mosquitos in our apartment. I hate them. They fly in through the gaps between our single pane windows and the window frames. I would gladly welcome back the plague of cockroaches hibernating in our walls if it meant an end to the mosquitos. At least cockroaches don't whisper in your ear all night. Every so often a cockroach wakes up and motors out into the blue glow of the TV. I kind of like seeing them. Once you start giving them names and making up little stories about them they're not so hard to live with. But, in the interests of population control it's always the same old story, "Sorry kids, Papa isn't coming home tonight."
  
  For a while I was sure I'd contracted Denghe Fever from a mosquito bite. It turns out it was only a nasty flu most likely passed on by Dean - an always sweating and coughing six year old who I try not to let touch me if I can help it. When I'm passing out the high-fives for spelling "sandwich" correctly, Dean gets a little air-guitar reward instead. We've heard you can't be too careful about fevers in Taiwan. Ignore the rising mercury and you could be out a limb or two if you're not careful.



• open-mouth eaters — Masticating with wet, gooey, chomps while talking is not okay. People do it all the time and it's annoying - especially if they're sitting directly across the table from you. Open, close, chew, swallow, talk.



• our neighbours — They often wake us up by:
  
  
  
  • Vacuuming their apartment at 2:00am. Stupid.
  
  
  
  • Having loud, sustained sex between 12:00 - 4:00am. It's a bit of a stretch to call our place an apartment. The entrepenurial spirit runs deep in Taiwan. Squeezing every $NT possible out of every transaction is the cultural norm and our landlord, who probably owns our place and our neighbour's place, is no exception to the norm. Our apartments, really one apartment divided into two, are separated only by a few sheets of dodgy drywall and a layer of hibernating cockroaches. We can hear everything.
    
    I'm no prude, but the sex noises are absolutely outrageous. No one, not even Trudy Styler, could maintain that level of genuine intensity for hours on end. The audible theatrics on the woman's part are equally painfully contrived. After burying our heads in our pillows for a while or turning on the air-conditioning to generate some white noise one of us will have to get up, pound on the wall and shout, "SHUT! — UP!" Now that's annoying.
  
  
  
  

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