Dump Day

My 'hometown' of Taipei is a modern and progressive city.  It's the type of city where the use of Styrofoam is banned for carry-out containers, recycling and composting are heavily encouraged, and trash bags cost money.  People can only take out their trash at a specific time of day when the garbage trucks come by the neighborhood.  The trucks play a song as they ride by and arrive in the same neighborhoods at the same time every week night, so it actually works pretty well as a system.  But these policies may reduce waste and increase sustainability, but they also make life incredibly difficult for the casual long-term visitor.  Such as myself.  Since I was almost never in the apartment Royce lent me in time for the trash trucks and only had 1 large official trash bag, we tried not to produce trash (green) and often resorted to illegal dumping (not green).  Casual wrappers and every day trash often made it into the cans at the metro stations.  The box of cake that the ants discovered were tripled wrapped and shoved into the Sheraton bathroom trash can.  And at the end of my stay, our large bag of official trash was brought on a 40-minute journey (during which we stopped for breakfast- trash bag put inside a pink tote bag that Dwight gamely carried) to my faux-godmother's church.  That night, when we still had a few empty water bottles and junk paper to dispose of, we took one last walk around the neighborhood, each with a bag in hand, pretended to act surprised at the public waste baskets we saw, dropped them in the first two we saw, turned around just in time to smile at the neighborhood watch ladies, then scurried back before they could suspect us of anything.  Two years of graduate education in public health, and this is what I've become.