People in Taiwan are loud. And they enjoy it.
I don't.
At the back of Tamsui MRT station, there is a riverfront park. It is nice when it's quiet. But it rarely is. I sat on a bench in the park, enjoying the view and the warm bread I just bought at a nearby Yamazaki. It was the evening of a weekday and there weren't many tourists. The place should be peaceful. I took a few deep breaths and felt relaxed. Then a street performer came. He settled at the far end of the park. I could barely see that it was a young man with an accoustic guitar. He began to sing some of those good-ole pop-folk songs in the early 80s. Apparently he had no talent. Worse yet, he wanted to make sure everyone in the park knew that. He put up two big speakers behind him and made himself heard all over the park. He effortlessly ruined my peace and quiet. I looked around, looking for other disgusted faces. I failed. Few people seemed to care about the noise. Were they deaf? Were they so big-hearted that they would tolerate a struggling young artist who wanted to have his day? Or were they simply numb?
With few exceptions, street performers in Taiwan are equipped with loudspeakers -- in MRT stations, the pedestrian zone of the Xinyi Shopping District, and the square of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. It's their right to tell the entire world -- not just the people who are interested and stand in front of them -- that they are showing off their stuff. If I am not interested, and deliberately stay 50 meters away from a blind father-daughter duo, do I have the right not to hear them sing "小城故事" or "月琴"? In Taiwan I don't. They always make me hear because they have a pair of 500-watt speakers.
A breezy evening in the square of SYS Memorial Hall is supposed to be nice. All the Chinese tourists have left for dinner. Too bad you can't have that either. You can't escape the hip-hop tunes from the boombox brought there by groups of high school "hot dance club" kids. Or the square dance songs coming from a bunch of gently swaying sixty-something women who don't look at all like cowgirls. They always succeed in spoiling it for me, a poor soul that is just asking for a moment of peace. Maybe I'm asking too much. After all this is a big city, and it is legal to be loud and noisy.
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