Shanghai'd

Comparison.

Having visited Beijing, Taipei, Kyoto and of course Shanghai in the past two weeks I find myself naturally drawing some bijiao between the four Asian cities. Here's my admittedly snap judgments:

Waiting in line etiquette:
1 - Taipei
2 - Kyoto
3 - Beijing
4 - Shanghai

It's interesting to see what characteristics of a city one values and notices after a few years in China. And these rankings were a bit of a surprise to me. Japan is stereotypically orderly in a "domo arigoto Mr. Roboto" kind of way. But Taipei was amazingly even more civilized. I was blown away to see people patiently waiting in a single file line to board the subway and public buses. Beijing gets the nod over Shanghai for 3rd place. Seems the monthly "practice waiting in line days" leading up to the Olympics are paying off.

Percentage of women who walk pigeon-toed:
1 - Kyoto
2(tie) - The rest

Not sure why, but tons of Japanese girls are extremely pigeon-toed, particularly favoring the left foot. Weird.

Likelihood of getting scammed as a foreigner in these cities:
1 - Beijing
2 - Shanghai
3 - Taipei
4 - Kyoto

Proud to say mainland China still dominates this category. It was strangely relaxing being able to take our guard down temporarily in Taiwan and Japan. Case in point was our shuttle ride to the airport in Japan where the driver accidentally rung up the wrong price. Without me even saying a word, he was already calling up the shuttle company to correct the mistake, followed by a 10 minute session of bows and apologies. The poor guy was seriously on the verge of pulling out his driver's sword and performing hari kiri in front of me to atone for the egregious error.

Cost of Living / cleanliness / air quality / water quality / etc, etc
1 - Kyoto
2 - Taipei
3 - Shanghai
4 - Beijing

Think these could somehow be related?

Number of temples per square mile:
1 - Kyoto
2 - Taipei
3 - Beijing
4 - Shanghai

Supposedly, the city of Kyoto has over 1,800. Plus 250 shrines. Taiwan puts on a strong showing here, but this one is really no contest. I think Shanghai has two.

Ease of communicating:
1 - Beijing
2 - Shanghai
3 - Taipei
4 - Kyoto

You might think Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei would all be the same (don't they all speak Mandarin Chinese?), but Beijingers speak very slowly with a standard accent that is much easier to understand than the Shanghai accent or completely unintelligible Shanghainese. The spoken Mandarin in Taiwan was no problem, but they use the traditional characters instead of the unfortunately simplified characters of the mainland. This made reading/writing more difficult. I wasn't expecting much native communication in Japan given my approximately 3 word of Japanese, but was actually pleasantly surprised that an understanding of Chinese characters provided a decent ability to navigate maps, bus routes and occasionally menus. Laurel and I even found ourselves communicating by writing characters back and forth.

Friendliness:
1 - Taipei
2 - Beijing
3 - Shanghai
4 - Kyoto

Granted I was probably unknowingly committing cultural faux pas left and right but I have never been rejected so often in my life as when we tried to find a restaurant on Saturday night without a reservation in Kyoto.

Average car height to width ratio:
1 - Kyoto
2 - Taipei
3,4(tie) - Beijing, Shanghai

I guess with such limited area for all those people the Japanese favor tall, narrow cars.

Use of horn:
1 - Shanghai
2 - Beijing
3 - Taipei
4 - Kyoto

Lack of constant honking was eerily peaceful in Taiwan and Japan.

Place I would most want to live:
Hmm, sorry to leave you all hanging, dear readers, but more research is needed on this one.