...”That part of Taiwan is beautiful”...
What were the people like? Are they concerned of further quakes?
I understand they live with them all the time. Sounds even worse than Japan. And some quakes in Taiwan have killed a lot of people.
No mention of quakes when we were there, except when we went to Sun-Moon Lake, which is their version of Lake Tahoe and a big honeymoon spot. We were told by our tour guide that during a large quake a few years ago*, one of the big hotels collapsed, but miraculously, no one in the hotel was killed. The hotel owners attributed it to the intervention of the gods, so they built a shrine out in front of the rebuilt hotel, by the lake, and the manager and employees conduct services there every morning to pray and thank the gods for protecting them in that earthquake and ask them for continued protection in the future.
People in Taiwan are quite nice and friendly, at least in the country areas where we were traveling, and pretty laid back. A lot of Taiwan outside of the Taipei area is actually pretty sparsely populated, which was a surprise to me. Every place Chinese I’ve been before has been a mass of people.
People are very different from Mainland Chinese, which they actually don’t like (not because of the political differences, but because they consider the Mainland Chinese to be rude and without manners or culture, which is true). I think the reason for that is that in Taiwan and other places like Japan and Korea they still have the concepts of the Confucian culture in terms of behavior and politeness, whereas in Mainland China all those concepts were wiped out by the Communists and it became a dog-eat-dog world where to get something you have to push everyone else out of the way.
The culture in Taiwan is also a blend of Chinese and Japanese cultures, since Taiwan was a Japanese colony up until the end of World War II. Unlike most of the rest of the Japanese colonies, the Taiwanese actually in general liked and like Japan, and look to Japan for a lot of their entertainment and education. Bunch of Taiwanese still go to Japan for college or other higher education. It’s kind of like Korean college students wanting to come to the U.S. for part of their education. So, for example, like the Japanese, Taiwanese like going to onsen (hot spring resorts), and it’s interesting, there you will see a lot of people dressed in traditional Japanese yukata and kimono, even though they are Chinese.
*http://www.taipeitimes.com.tw/News/feat/archives/2003/09/21/2003068737