The Roving Reporter

It's a small, small world...

Posted by: Amy Reiter

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 10:55 AM

In terms of activities, today was probably the best day so far for me. Calvin, a very nice Taiwanese Rotarian, set up a meeting for me with two Taiwanese journalists and then Calvin helped translate the conversation. For an hour and a half, we talked about newspapers, compared work schedules and responsibilities, issues facing newspapers -- like getting younger readers -- and talked about objectivity, the Internet and all sorts of stuff non-reporters might find boring, but I found fascinating.

Right now, the China Times -- one of the largest newspapers in the country, with a million readers -- is downsizing its staff, and reporters generally produce three to five articles a day. I usually write one article a day! I didn't feel lazy until now.

Probably what was most exciting for me was realizing, yet again, how similar our jobs are and how similar our lives and concerns are. It makes the world feel very small, in a good way in this case.

The other supercool thing we did today was tour the city government offices. We met with the deputy director of education for the city of Kaohsiung, and he told us that 90 percent of the students who finish high school here go on to college, which seems like quite a lot. He also said that the universities have improved, so that many of the students who once went to college abroad are now staying here for their higher ed.

We also met with the director of Kaohsiung's branch of the military. Military service is compulsory for men in Taiwan, and the army consists about about 270,000 people. Women can join the military and go to military school if they want to, but they're not forced to. The director said that right now compulsory service lasts about a year and a half, but that is likely to be shortened in the near future as the army reduces it's size. He said that the military accounts for about 10 percent of the government budget.

Anyway, that's my education for today. Tomorrow we're supposed to ride a high-speed train. It goes almost as fast as an airplane!

OK, one more little piece of knowledge:

Word of the day:
mei-guo = America

Amy

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