I recently finished my summer internship at AppWorks in Taipei and loved every minute of it. I met some genuinely good people, formed what I hope will be lifelong friendships, and learned an incredible amount from the best, who were always willing to teach. To everyone I met this summer who is reading this, please know you will always have a special place in my heart and I do hope we will meet again. But before I leave to go back to the US to finish my MBA, I had to find out about something very distinctive about Taiwan: What’s with all the scooters?
Scooters crossing the Taipei Bridge. (I’ll refer to “scooters” as the type of step-through motorcycle popular in Southeast Asia, not the non-motorized “kick scooters” in the style of Bird or Lime.) Photo by sgpoonie (Instagram).
I still remember the first time I came to Taipei last summer. I stepped out of Taipei Main Station that night and easily the first thing I noticed was the roar of the many scooters on the streets. The scooters and their collective vroom against the backdrop of the Taipei night lights was so distinctive because you normally associate ubiquitous scooters with dusty, developing Southeast Asian countries, not a developed country like Taiwan.