A Nantou County man had an unpleasant surprise on Friday when a snake bit him on the scrotum as he sat on the toilet.
“I felt an excruciating pain in my lower body, like someone had stabbed me with a knife, shortly after sitting on the toilet bowl … I stood up immediately and saw blood oozing from my crotch,” the 50-year-old man, surnamed Lin (林), told reporters yesterday.
When he turned around and looked into the toilet, he saw a large snake in it, Lin said.
“I thought it might have been a poisonous snake. To prevent it from hurting anyone else I tried to flush the toilet several times but the snake would not go down the drain,” Lin said.
Failing to flush the snake, Lin shut the lid of the toilet and went to the hospital.
However, doctors needed to identify the snake that bit Lin to administer the appropriate antivenin, so Lin’s doctor asked Lin’s neighbors to catch the 170cm-long snake.
“The snake was a Taiwan Beauty Ratsnake [Orthriophis taeniura friesi], which is not venomous. If it were a poisonous snake, Lin would be lucky to be alive,” Lin’s doctor was quoted as saying.
Taiwan beauties are large non-venomous snakes that can reach up to 2m in length. The snake is a protected species, and are sometimes kept as pets by people.
Though it is hard to say how the snake got into the toilet bowl, Lin’s neighbors suspect it might have entered the plumbing system through Lin’s septic tank, which has a cracked lid, and then swum up the toilet for air.
Lin said he now has a phobia of toilets following the incident and will only use a newly purchased plastic toilet bowl.
However, he said he was glad the snake was released into the wild after it was identified.
“It was the snake’s signal for help when it bit me. If it hadn’t, maybe it would have been stuck in the septic tank and either suffocated or starved to death. It looked like an accident but it was actually fate,” Lin said.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday voiced dissatisfaction with the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans- Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), whose latest meeting, concluded earlier the same day, appeared not to address the country’s application. In a statement, MOFA said the CPTPP commission had "once again failed to fairly process Taiwan’s application," attributing the inaction to the bloc’s "succumbing to political pressure," without elaborating. Taiwan submitted its CPTPP application under the name "Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu" on Sept. 22, 2021 -- less than a week after China
ALIGNED THINKING: Taiwan and Japan have a mutual interest in trade, culture and engineering, and can work together for stability, Cho Jung-tai said Taiwan and Japan are two like-minded countries willing to work together to form a “safety barrier” in the Indo-Pacific region, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) yesterday said at the opening ceremony of the 35th Taiwan-Japan Modern Engineering and Technology Symposium in Taipei. Taiwan and Japan are close geographically and closer emotionally, he added. Citing the overflowing of a barrier lake in the Mataian River (馬太鞍溪) in September, Cho said the submersible water level sensors given by Japan during the disaster helped Taiwan monitor the lake’s water levels more accurately. Japan also provided a lot of vaccines early in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,
THE GOOD WORD: More than 100 colleges on both sides of the Pacific will work together to bring students to Taiwan so they can learn Mandarin where it is spoken A total of 102 universities from Taiwan and the US are collaborating in a push to promote Taiwan as the first-choice place to learn Mandarin, with seven Mandarin learning centers stood up in the US to train and support teachers, the Foundation for International Cooperation in Higher Education of Taiwan (FICHET) said. At the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages held over the weekend in New Orleans, Louisiana, a Taiwan Pavilion was jointly run by 17 representative teams from the FICHET, the Overseas Community Affairs Council, the Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency-Huayu, the
A home-style restaurant opened by a Taiwanese woman in Quezon City in Metro Manila has been featured in the first-ever Michelin Guide honoring exceptional restaurants in the Philippines. The restaurant, Fong Wei Wu (豐味屋), was one of 74 eateries to receive a “Michelin Selected” honor in the guide, while one restaurant received two Michelin stars, eight received one star and 25 were awarded a “Bib Gourmand.” The guide, which was limited to restaurants in Metro Manila and Cebu, was published on Oct. 30. In an interview, Feng Wei Wu’s owner and chef, Linda, said that as a restaurateur in her 60s, receiving an
RSS