So, I moved in with my girlfriend some 9 months ago and to start with it was all quite nice and quiet out here, that was until the crazy grandma from hell reared her ugly head. This woman has been driving us nuts for the last six months, for no good reason. She’s been blaiming us for messing with her cable TV so she can’t watch what she wants, we’re spying on her and we’re trying to break into her place to steal things. It started with her shouting abuse in the staircase and after a while she began to bang the security door, which is made from steel and makes a hell of a racket. Later we found out she’d been chasing the building cleaner down from the 8th floor to the ground floor, mind you, she’s in her 70’s…
She then continued by calling the police on us, but they just told her to get a new TV. After a few months of this shit, with us calling the building security guard and the police when it got out of hand, things weren’t getting any better so we tried to find out what we could do. The response from most people was that we must’ve done something to this poor old lady, which we hadn’t, and that we shouldn’t be so mean to her. Well, things got pretty heated one night when we were going to go out for some dinner and she stopped us with a broomstick which she ended up hitting me on the shoulder with. Being a foreginer in Taiwan has its dissadvantages, as the police said they couldn’t help as I was a foreginer…
Great, anyhow, to make a long story short, last week Friday, Brenda got home from a business trip to the US and had some other things to do in the day, so she couldn’t just crash in bed. She went to bed in the afternoon instead and around 9pm the crazy woman starts banging the door like never before. Brenda being jetlagged, tired and fed up calls the building security guard which comes up and aske the woman to quiet down, which she doesn’t. In the end Brenda goes and gets a tool kit we bought in Ikea which has a small assortment of tools in it, one of them being a hammer which she takes out. I didn’t really know what she was going to do, I though she was going to go and bang the womans door with it…
Well, that wasn’t the case, instead she decided to threaten the woman with it, but the crazy grandma decides to attack her and they end up struggling over the hammer. Brenda then pulls her into our flat and manages to throw her down on the floor. We then call the police and like wise does the crazy woman. We all end up in the local hospital as she scratched Brenda’s arm quite badly and she scraped her head on something. After about 3h in the hospital, mostly waiting for things to happen, with the woman going nuts so they have to call the police again, her son turn up, someone we’ve tried to get in touch with for quite some time, but as no-one knew how, we was unable to do so until now. We wander down to the police station once Brenda has been patched up and given a shot and some medication, as it’s only about five minutes walk from the hospital…
We explain to them what happened and that her son is here, so they first call the hospital, but are told they’ve already left, so they call her place instead and gets to talk to her son and asks them to come down to the police station. After a while they turn up and she starts crying and shouting as soon as they come in and she sees me. Now her story is that Brenda pulled her in and I threw her on the floor. Her nickname for me by the way is Binladen number two and aparently Brenda likes to smell foreginers poo. Anyhow, we get ushered into the back of the police station into a break room and they have a quick chat with her son first. Then we all sit down for chat and it quickly comes to light that she’s been to mental hospital several times before and that her son doesn’t really want to deal with it. At the end of the night it’s decided that she’s going to go back to the mental hospital and the police calls an ambulance to come and get her…
So far, she hasn’t come back and we were informed that if they let her out and she starts this kind of stuff again, we can just call the emergency services and they’ll come and take care of her again. Considering that we contacted a couple of lawyers, the local city council and the police, it seems like you need to get physical here for something to actually get resolved in the way it should. We just wanted the crazy woman to get some help, but no-one seemed willing to get involved. Now this could’ve happened anywhere in the world, so don’t think this is typical of Taiwan, as most people here are very much nice and friendly, although they do tend to stare a bit too long on foreginers, mostly out of curiosity though, as there’s till not that many foreginers here, at least not outside of Taipei and the other big cities. I’m not suggesting this was a good way of doing things, but at least the end result worked out ok.