On any given night in Taiwan, you will pass someone going through stacks and stacks of junk to pull out all the cardboard and plastic they can. They'll be driving small trucks, or riding flatbed bikes like this lady.

(I know I look really serious, but I'm trying to ride my bike and take a video at the same time. Even though it was pretty late at night, you never know when a moped's going to dart out from nowhere).

Everyone tells me that Taiwanese people are notoriously stingy -- which I know, to some extent, is foreigner's saying things that make them sound like they really know the people* -- but I wonder if some of the people doing this aren't poor people. I've seen older couples in their sixties loading a tricycle motorcycle. The man was wearing a nice pair of pressed Khakis, a tucked-in Lacoste polo shirt, and a pair of work gloves. It looked like he had just come from an afternoon of playing golf to his nightly trash pickup.

I honestly don't know why the trash truck is followed by a recycling truck. None of my recycling has ever made it into the truck, as it is gobbled up by the three ladies that wait at the corner to take it off my hands.


* If Taiwanese people are supposedly so stingy, then why do they by cheap-ass breakable crap over and over when they could spend a little extra dough on something more durable