Taoyuan Nights

I’ve been busy marking coursework for the last week, and now my laptop is off for a repair, so I’ve been a little bit quiet as far as the blog is concerned. This period of reflection has, however, led me to ponder one of the greatest mysteries of Taiwanese life.

Fact 1. It is part of Taiwanese culture to take your shoes off at the door when you enter a house. The reasons for this are tradition (Taiwan was once occupied by the Japanese, who had a big influence on Taiwanese culture) and supposedly ‘health/cleanliness’. Shoes are therefore left on a rack outside the door so that people can ‘healthily’ proceed to walk around their own homes.

Fact 2. Many families keep dogs (or, as I prefer to call them, ‘noisy turd factories’). I’ve even had students show up for lectures with a dog tucked away in their handbag. They’re quite ubiquitous. Dogs are usually kept in the home or sometimes, in the case of large dogs, kept in a rather small cage outside the house.

The problem with this is simple: Dogs do not wear shoes. Therefore, when dogs run around outside, merrily jumping into each other’s turds, dirty puddles and so on, they still have all that crap on their feet by the time they get home. And the very first thing they want to do when they get home is smear it all over your ‘clean’ living room floor.

Some people do attempt to make their dogs feet a little cleaner before allowing them into the house, by grabbing each of the dogs feet and giving it a brisk wipe against the door mat. But this just leads to further questions…

• Do they believe Ecoli bacteria and Toxicariasis worms are destroyed by a quick rub against an old mat?
• And if they do… and if a dog’s feet can be effectively sanitised by rubbing them on a mat… then why not human shoes?

I guess what amazes me most in all of this, is that some dazzling entrepreneur has not stepped forward to provide conveniently available ‘dog shoes’… but I’m sure it will eventually happen. And when it does, I sincerely hope they have ‘Hello Kitty’ emblazoned on the side…