Car Accidents

After finally getting my drivers license on my 5th try, I was really looking forward to my Taiwan trip this time - I could actually drive to Taipei City instead of waiting for the once-per-hour bus that doesn't run past 11:00 pm and doesn't run on Sundays.

When I was younger, I was able to hitch a ride from people living within the community, but now nobody is willing to stop for me. However it wasn't as easy as i thought - Taiwanese driving is nuts. People don't use the signal lights and may suddenly change lanes, nobody follows the speed limits, and cars might even suddenly stop in the road if the driver is not sure where they want to go. But the most dangerous are the motorcycles constantly snaking through and between cars, even on narrow roads.

So... first incident happened. I was driving to the post office, and tried to take a shortcut on a backroad. Suddenly I found myself stuck in a narrow, dead end alley with cars parked on both sides. When I tried to back out... BOOM. I smashed into one of the parked cars. The owner was playing video games inside the house, and his neighbors immediately notified him. He didn't really seem angry at all, his wife even said "wow, that's some cool damage" and carried her daughter out to look at it. However, I had to do what I had to do - we drove to the car repair shop and I paid for the damages.

All was fine until a week later - I was driving down the back road again and a motorcycle came out of nowhere and we had a head-on collision. His motorcycle was pretty much destroyed and the whole front of my car was smashed. Luckily, the guy was O.K., but he the first thing he said when he got up was "how are you going to pay for this?" He insisted that I ran a red light, while I was pretty sure that it was he who wasn't following the rules.

We called the police, but since there were no witnesses, they couldn't prove who was at fault. It is common for motorcyclists to adopt a victim attitude - obviously they suffer more serious damage. However, I would not back down, since it really came down to who ran the red light. Finally, the police did our reports, and told us to check the court's decision in 30 days. Most likely they would deem both of us at fault, and the charges would cancel each other out. After that, we still had to settle in civil court.

The next day, we went around to check if there were any cameras that caught the incident. We spotted a government one across the street, and we went to the district administrator's office to watch the tape. However, he told us that since that side of the street was outside Taipei city limits, the scope of the camera stopped just short of the accident site.

That ended our hopes of finding out what really happened, and now we just have to wait.