I was hoping to post this shortly after the previous one, but eh, whatevers.
To summarize my experience in Taiwan, I will tell you that it was alright at best. But nonetheless there was something that made it special and dear to me.
Living:
I think its safe to say that the first month was hard on all of us. For the first two weeks I was staying here: http://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/The-Meeting-Place/Taipei/44241. Total pain in the ass when I was looking for it for the first time, since I was lugging around a years worth of living material in humid weather. Even my taxi driver,who I found out later ripped me off, couldn't find the place. It was $6 US/night at the time. It was a pretty nice place, a lot nicer than most of the places that I stayed at when I was in SE Asia. Comfy beds, clean sheets, free beer, fast internet, big projector and screen, kitchen, hot showers, clean toilets, but no A/C -_- so it got really hot in the mornings. And of course at a place like this, I met interesting people from all over the world. There was a big night market near by that I could walk to to get a cheap snack, a Costco that was a short bus ride away, the MRT(metro) stop was not too far, and Taipei 101 was only two stops away.
Where were Kim and Christina? Their arrival in Taiwan wasn't as brutal as mine, since they had someone to pick them up from the airport and take them to their destination, and also Christina traveled with her parents. Kim was staying in her great uncle(?)'s apartment, while Christina and her parents were staying with her uncle at their place. Here's the kick in the nuts, we were all pretty freaking far from each other. I was on the far east side, Kim was somewhere in the midwest (don't think American geography here) and Christina was so south that where she was wasn't considered the city anymore, it was the county. Here are our MRT stops to let you know how we were situated.
As you can see I am 11 stops away from Kim, and 18 stops away from Christina, about 30 mins and an hour respectively. And of course, the girls can't walk home by themselves at night. I eventually moved in with Kim after two weeks to save money. There's no internet there, so we would go to the Mr Brown nearby for wifi, Kim still goes there today for internet.
Jobs:
Keep in mind that the three of us did NOT have jobs before we came to Taiwan. This wasn't South Korea, where you apply and get accepted in the States, no we came with the prospect to apply for and find teaching positions there ourselves. I think what made the first month really hard for us was the expectations we had for ourselves, we were expecting to find jobs right off the bat. Who wouldn't want to hire three UCLA grads? We were expecting job offers left and right, but damn what we got was a very humbling experience. We emailed countless resumes, dropped some off at schools all over Taipei, and got a decent amount of interviews and demos, but no luck. It probably had to do with two things, the fact that we lacked teaching experience, the fact that we were Asian. Of course this made our whole entire experience in Taiwan hard. I think I would've enjoyed Taiwan a lot more if my focus wasn't looking for a job. We originally wanted to look for a job in Taipei, but since that wasn't working out so well for us, we decided to broaden our search to Hsinchu.
Funsies and Foods:
Despite the damper that the lack of jobs was putting on us, we still allowed ourselves to have some fun and discover Taipei. When it comes to food, there is no authority that I recognize more than yelp, but there's no yelp in Taiwan, so we settled for the next best thing, http://hungryintaipei.blogspot.com/ Taipei 101 is the second tallest skyscraper in the world, and there were some cool things there, specifically the food court and the bookstore. The coast of the island was good to bike on. There's plenty of night markets to go to and I got to enjoy the local fare, oyster omelette, stinky tofu, taiwanese sausage, and others. Even though Taiwan invented Boba, it wasn't as great as I expected it to be, but it was really really cheap. There was only one place that I really considered outstanding. For my birthday we helped ourselves to a Western brunch since we missed home. We also went to the zoo, general admission $1 dollar!!!!! And the animals there actually move around, unlike here >_>
Apartment hunting:
I really wish I had the opportunity to take a second helping of Chinese, because the intensive course did little to prepare me for Taiwan. None of us were fluent in Chinese, and there's only so much pointing and gestures can do. So thats what made apartment hunting so hard but luckily we had some help from Christina's family. The apartments in Taiwan are very different from the apartments here, and I didn't really like any of the apartments that we saw. I think we wanted a more westernized unit. This was another expectation that wasn't met. We were hoping to find a nice place to live not too long after arriving. But prospects dwindled, on top of the lack of us getting jobs, this made the first month even harder.
I'm sorry to say this but I'm gonna have to pull an Eragon on you guys and HOPEFULLY conclude this story in my next post. This post was getting much longer than I expected. So to keep it short I am cutting it off here. Tune in next time to see how Kim and Christina got jobs, how we all found an awesome place to live, and why Taiwan was special to me.
