High Speed in Taiwan

These are the trial runs for the Taiwan High Speed, from a couple years back. One thing that I found interesting was the driver appeared to be Taiwanese (I can only see that back of his head and his hand in the clip). I take the High Speed Rail quite a bit, and I have never noticed a Taiwanese driver. I have noticed lots of "foreign" drivers. Naturally, I was curious about the figures. This is what I found online: "At the start of operations, nearly all train operators were foreign. Of the current 89 train operators, however, 54 are Taiwanese; the remaining 35 are mostly French..." http://thirstyghosts2.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-right-track.html

I wonder what the exact totals were at the start. "Nearly all" sounds a bit weird (fishy) to me. Anyway, if all, or even nearly all, the drivers were "foreign", why not show a "foreign" driver in this promotional clip?

Taiwan High Speed

I've been traveling around Taiwan a lot recently for work. Today, I visited Kaohsiung to give a three-hour speech to around 40 high school teachers on public speaking. It was stimulating - the teachers were receptive and I got lots of feedback. One of the best things about this recent flurry of travel activity is that I've been able to get out of Taipei, where the weather is cold and damp, and the people are, well, a bit rigid. It was misty cold when I left Taipei, 16 - 18 degrees Celsius. When I arrived at Kaohsiung's High Speed Rail Station 90 minutes later (above pics), it was a sunny 25 degrees.

I've included a shot of a "Kiss and Ride" sign. A couple of months ago, FTV interviewed me about "Kiss and Ride". I figured they were just looking for a usual angle - "Look, this foreigner can speak Chinese! How did he do it! Everybody knows that Chinese is the hardest language in the world [translation: only Chinese people are smart enough to speak Chinese]!" The reporter caught me off guard though by asking me about "Kiss and Ride" in the US. I had no idea what she was talking about so I assured her it was French.

Later, when I googled it, I found out it meant that wives should drop their husbands off at the train or MRT, so they could save part of the commute and on parking.