Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Is that the ice cream truck?

You know when you wake up in the middle of the night and realize you forgot to take the garbage and recycling out to the street? Or you hear the truck at 6am passing your house and it hits you that you have to go another week with garbage piling up? Taiwan has come up with an idea to solve this problem. Good thing too, because when you live on a small island with lots of people in a subtropical weather system piling garbage can be a nuisance to say the least.

Taiwan's solution? To let people bring their own garbage out to the truck daily. But, how do people know when the garbage truck is coming you ask? Well they play classical music of course. It's kind of like the ice cream man - kids hear the song and come running with their money, only it's adults with their garbage. You can see a video here. It's genius, but a bit loud.

Picture taken from video

Our apartment has its own garbage collection, so we aren't a part of this neighbor bonding time, but we hear it in the evenings along side the trucks that blast audio advertising and kids practicing violin, piano and recorders.

5 comments:

  1. Hah, I swear this was one of the first differences I noticed and one of the most difficult to get used to. Now I'm just not sure how I'm going to react when I don't hear "Fur Elise" blasting from the speakers atop the garbage truck on Sunday night and for the 2 1/2 weeks following. :)

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  2. That is seriously hilarious. I wonder what happens if you're gone? Maybe you find a helpful neighbor to catch the truck for you...

    It's better than in Cairo, which my parents informed us has absolutely NO formal trash service...in a city of 10+ million...yuck!

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  3. super funny. me and lee are laughing, and sipping tea. happy xmas yall!!!

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  4. We laughed and laughed and laughed! Awesome!!!

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