The thing about Taiwan is the queue. It’s not an especially clean city, it’s not an especially orderly city (just look at the traffic for 30 seconds); but somehow, strangely, it’s all about the queue. For whatever reason, the Taiwanese line up, orderly and quietly, in every situation that even implies a line. Waiting for the bus? Queue up. Waiting for the metro? Queue again. Taxi, grocery checkout, vending machine? Queue, queue, queue.

There are, of course, many situations where it makes perfect sense to stand in line… at the grocery store for instance. But a bus stop? 15 minutes before a bus is even going to arrive? In the rain? It’s an interesting phenomenon to say the least.

In the local metro, the train stops, as in most cities, at a predefined location (and I don’t mean “the station”, I mean at a specific point at the train stop). Therefore, the door location is marked on the floor so that you might know where to expect to board. The markings consist of three arrows. Two face towards the train and are on either of the outside edges of the door, and faces away from the train, right down the middle. Presumably, these markings indicate that people should exit the train right down the middle, while people enter the train from the sides. The Taiwanese apparently agree with me, as they queue up along these enter lines as they wait for the train to arrive. They don’t stand around in groups chatting, they don’t wander up and down the platform, whiling away the minutes. They line up orderly and quietly.