The backpackers I stayed in at first was full if expat Brits and yanks, teaching english and learning chinese. It was quite an eye opener. I quickly reversed my view of myself being primarily Australian. I could see in these people my real origin. I was really a Singaporean Chinese person living in a foreign land. I was in-fact an expat. Though, because I had left at a young age, I also was in significant part Australian. More than 50%.
The expat community was very diverse. I’d the the majority were middle class. I found myself being befriended by a man who had served in the British army in north Ireland. He had been invalided out after an IRA Road side bomb caused significant damage to his leg. Though he could still walk. He had left his job, and gave me his payout to protect as I had a lockable locker. This I reluctantly did and gave him back the money when I left. It was not insignificant, over $20,000 NTD.
For two evenings we went out and ate on the street. They gave me this drink. It was like ginger beer, both in taste and in a similar bottle. But in typical chinese style, it had everything you can think of in it. Ginger, ginseng, the list was a mile long. They thought it would effect me. But I had no trouble sleeping. At the end of the meal each night, I would go off to my dorm bed, while he and this other man headed off to climb the wall of the American Embassy, long abandoned. What they did in there I do not know.
The backpackers itself was, I thought a fire trap. My dorm had about 6 bunk beds. My bed was small, but not too small for me. It had a curtain and three computer fans connected by uninstalled wired for air flow. The fellow backpackers were a great group of people.
For a few days, there was this Hungarian man. I think he was the only Caucasian tourist I met in the whole three weeks Taiwan.