Government Taxes

After days and days of rain, it FINALLY quit today, it was very exciting! I had my first Mandarin Chinese Level I class today. I took this in China a couple years back, however we had a very informal class and did not learn characters, so it will be good to take this course again to retain more. The professor is Chinese, she learned Cantonese in China, and then learned Mandarin and English. This was interesting to hear, as it made some weird things in China make sense. Throughout the country, China has different dialects; They speak Mandarin mainly in Beijing, Cantonese, Shanghai, etc. When we went to Xi'an, no locals could understand our Mandarin and our professor who was a native had trouble understanding theirs. There are over 8000 characters in Chinese, yet only 21 initial and 39 final syllables, with 4 tones. Therefore, the tone-ation of the word is VERY important in order to create such a vast array of speech. In the different dialects, however, (such as Xi'an vs. Beijing) the tones are completely different, which was why nobody there could understand us!

I met a Singaporean Indian, whose family has been living in Singapore since a large migration of about 100 families came to Singapore. I had made the mistake in assuming everyone in Singapore knew Chinese, but about half my Mandarin class was actually Singaporeans! (few Vietnamese, Indians, Malay, 1 US and 1 French). Him and I got to talking after class, he was asking me what kind of other activities I do here, which is something I discovered (think the dorm stuff I talked about earlier) that ALL the local students are involved in something, clubs, games, sports, etc. We walked about family, he is in a play and invited me to see it, but its in Tamil so he said never mind haha He thinks that's its funny that I am "American" but I come from all European roots, as he considers himself Indian, even though him and his family has been living in Singapore for many generations. We then started talking about cars/bikes (motocycles) and I learned something rather interesting.

So as you may have saw in my photos, alcohol here is EXPENSIVE, so are cigarettes. This is because anything in high demand (booze, cars, etc) gets heavily taxed. Care are especially pricey:

First, you must bid for a COE (certificate of entitlement). Each month, people can bid and get an entitlement that is good for 10 years. There are only a certain number of bids open each month. They costs lots to set a bid, and they are a big hot topic here. You bid on the type of car you want (luxury, small, SUV, etc).  Half of the bid is required as a deposit up front. If you win, you have 3-6 months to pay for the car.

Then, registration fees and such, which can cost $1k for personal vehicles. They also have this super fun thing called Electronic Road Pricing. In all the cars in this country, there is a little computer chip. If you are caught in a busy road/intersection during rush hour, you get fined.

The whole point is to keep cars off the street, desire for cars down, and pollution and road building to a minimum. Interesting way to go about it!