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Johnny Neihu's Mailbag
That's not deja vu you're feeling as you flit through
bullet train stations in southern counties. The
stations are exactly the same design, says one reader.
Damn ... hopefully the signs are different.
Saturday, Mar 03, 2007, Page 8
Cloned station express
Dear Johnny,
Any idea why the Chiayi and Tainan stations of the bullet train are built using exactly the same architectural design, 99.9 percent the same building, materials and all?
It's true. Both stations are the same design, just different names in front. The same architect.
Why? To save money?
Also, the tickets for the bullet train do not mention anywhere on the ticket stub that the issuer is Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp, not once. Talk about branding!
Why would anyone want to collect a ticket that does not even state the name of the issuer, anywhere, not in Chinese or English or Japanese? Nuttin! Go look.
Chiayi Chuck
Johnny replies: I bet you didn't know this, but back in the days when I could run around in public without wearing any pants, the refugee Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government decided to split up some of the counties into smaller ones, presumably so that local government could operate in a more relevant manner.
One of these counties was Taipei, which included today's Taipei, Taoyuan and Ilan counties.
Another was Tainan, which was split into today's Tainan, Chiayi and Yunlin counties.
So forgive my onset of paranoia if I smell a rat. It seems to me that Tainan supremacists have infiltrated the operations of the bullet train construction process to ensure that old Tainan is unified -- starting with these stations.
But there's another possibility. Everyone's talking about the 228 Incident at the moment, right? Well, did you know that there is a hideous obelisk commemorating the 228 Incident in Chiayi that has a clone up in the mountains in Alishan Township (阿里山)?
Yep, that's right. The same obelisk, and even the same text describing what happened (stupidly enough, the Alishan clone makes no mention of why Alishan should have its own obelisk). So maybe the problem is with Chiayi, Chuck. You guys just dig cloning.
Or else it's what normal people would guess: The stations are the same and tickets unmarked because the good people at Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp couldn't be bothered.
But if so, give them a break: The officials then had more time to concentrate on buying up prime land near the stations for themselves.
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