Anatomy of a Taiwanese Receipt

Recently I acquired a new piece of plastic for my wallet. Having a 7/11 downstairs in your apartment building makes it the convenient stopping point for all your short-term Coke Zero and dumpling needs. 7/11 has its own recharge card system, whereby you load money onto an "ICASH" card and use it for purchasing your bits and bobs.

Aside from the convenience of just grabbing the card and taking it down when I feel like a bite (and not ending up with a pocketful of coins in change) selected items that change from time to time effectively have a discount as they earn icash dollars. On this purchase, the items earned $8 (about NZ 30 cents) although it's not visible in the photos below.


Speaking of receipts, there must be some smart cookies tucked away in the Taipei National Tax Administration. In order to get stores reporting (taxable) income, Taiwan has a receipt lottery system. Every receipt is effectively a lottery ticket, with a top prize of around NZ$45,000. Because of the lottery, people ask for receipts when they purchase an item, which records the purchase in the system making it taxable. Now there's a real carrot instead of stick approach!

I collect all my receipts and click them together in a safe place - below is my current collection for July and August. In the photo, you can see a green circle at one end of the receipt with some letters and numbers printed over it. Those characters are the receipt's individual number. Every two months, numbers are drawn and people can check all their receipts to see whether they won anything.
To check your lottery numbers, visit the Ministry of Finance's website (http://www.ntat.gov.tw/) and look for a link along the lines of "Uniform Invoice Winning Numbers". Use Google translate if reading Mandarin isn't your forte. The next draw (covering July-August 2008) should be announced in Sepetmber 2008. Good luck!

First video from Taipei (Mandarin)

First video, using my five weeks of Mandarin. Please excuse some of the pronunciation (kerrrrrrrrshi!!). Rough translation for people back home:

"Hello everyone, my name is Shan Shan (my Mandarin name, means Coral), I am a Kiwi. Today is August 2nd. I came to Taipei on 24 June this year to learn Mandarin. I feel that Taipei is very hot. I understand some Mandarin. Mandarin is hard but interesting. My spoken Mandarin is not good, sorry.

"Right now we are inside my kitchen. I like to eat Taiwan things. Chinese food tastes good, but I most love Kiwi nosh. This is Japanese sushi. It looks and tastes good. This is my fruit. I enjoy eating grapes, apples and peaches. I don't like eating bananas, but I still want to cook a banana cake (probably poor mandarin, string of grammar guess-work). I also like to drink cola and white wine. I buy alot of pearl milk tea. It costs 30 NTD a cup - cheap!

Thanks and goodbye."

Picture books, pies and Da An Park

To have fun while improving my Mandarin reading, I have begun buying picture books. Really, it's more just an excuse to buy children's books without actually having children - I love the artwork in picture books, and sometimes those stories can be real page turners!

This one pictured below is the one I am currently translating. There are some pretty crucial words I don't yet know, so although I am about a third of the way through pin-yin-ing it, to be honest I'm not sure what it's actually about yet. I will update on this when I figure it out.

Today marked my first visit to Pie Boy, a kiwi pie shop (blog.yam.com/pieboy). Nom nom! The great thing about this place, besides satisfying my taste for home made pie pastry, is the yummy vege soup. Just like home!

While walking through Da An Park, I came across this free traditional story telling drama event, which was apparently attached to some Children's Arts Festival. Random but cool. The lead character was wearing a headpiece with what looked like huge antennae, and the supporting actors were quite acrobatic.