Tag Archives: taipei

Apartment searching in Taipei and counting unhatched poultry.

Tomorrow night, we will have been in Taipei for a week, and what a tiring and long week it has been. We have been occupied with trying to meet people at my new workplace, putting Steve’s computer back together, taking care of business from home in Boston and Greenville, and above all, the apartment search that has sent Steve and me criss-crossing this bustling, humid city.

Today, the apartment search may have ended. I say may have, because our application for a spot hasn’t been accepted yet, but the broker said he would inform us tomorrow, and to make sure we were ready to submit our deposit and sign a lease. In some ways, it certainly has – we’ve found a place that finally checks all our boxes, and is even within our price range. It’s near Da’an Forest Park, the biggest, most wonderful park in Taipei, and nearly next door to a Wellcome grocery store and a post office and walking distance of several delicious night markets. It’s a quietly appointed, gorgeous apartment with a study for Steve and comes nearly entirely furnished. We are most definitely counting this chicken before it hatches, but having seen more than ten apartments over the last week, we are more than aware of the range of possibilities, and we’re ready to call it quits because this is definitely one of the best. Here’s to hoping we get a positive response tomorrow!!!

Excitingly enough, I’ve also been meeting people at my new workplace! I visited on Friday to say hi to everyone, and briefly meet with our CEO. I got the grand tour (okay, really a small tour) of the facility – there is a large common room, three other rooms used as separate meeting rooms, a kitchen with plenty of coffee, and even a ping-pong table. Yep, I’m joining the start-up world. That ping-pong table is a dead giveaway. I’m also starting to have lunch with people to learn more about them and to help me hit the ground running when I start next Monday. That’s right, my first day of work here in Taiwan will be Monday, July 4. That’s what happens when you’re the only American working at a company in Taiwan: nobody thinks there’s anything special about July 4. It’s kind of refreshing for a change.

What’s on my mind is all these mundane things like searching for apartments and starting a new job, but underneath it all is a bit of quiet wonder and appreciation for the fact that we’re in Taiwan again, and this time for a long haul. There’s not a real rush to see everything, in recognition of the fact that we will make it to X restaurant or Y temple at some point. I can recognize ads for events and music festivals on the MRT, and pencil it in on our calendar, because we’ll be here several months from now! It is so special to be here in Taipei, but it is also real life, not vacation. In recognition of that, I’ve started running again every other day, along the riverbank nearby and hopefully soon, around Da’an Forest Park.

Steve has promised (!!!) to write an entry soon about what he’s been doing here, so I’ll leave it up to him. Otherwise, the world will just never hear about what he’s up to. Oh, well.

More to come tomorrow!
Connie

Hello, goodbye, Taipei.

Tomorrow is our last day in Taipei and Taiwan! Steve and I have stretched our 90-day visa-free entrance stamps to the limit, but tomorrow, we board a plane for Hong Kong, and get to hang out in Hong Kong for four more days before finally leaving Asia for the summer. When we first came here for the summer, Taichung seemed strange and made me feel lonely and homesick, but within a week, everything clicked into place. Since then, living here has felt so natural, so nice. Especially being back in Taipei this week, I take the MRT here for granted, being able to zip back and forth through the city in shiny subway cars and ferried through in relative cool A/C. Being able to take a look around at any intersection and find three convenience stores where I can get my fix of tea drinks or cheap sandwiches. When I walk down the street, looking for scooters and cars roaring by has become second nature. Being able to walk everywhere with a beer in hand, having stinky tofu right around the corner at any one of five night markets in a city (okay that’s just me), and cooing at people’s long-haired dachshunds, which is a definite trend in pets here. I mean, the list literally goes on and on. Steve and I will miss Taiwan severely when we leave this summer.

We’ve had a great time this past week in Taipei, staying with Kara and Ken who have been such helpful and gracious hosts! On Saturday, we climbed Yangmingshan together with their friend Eric, a native Taiwanese, and had a great time. On Sunday, Steve and I visited the Taipei Zoo where they have raccoons (yes, raccoons behind bars) and also climbed Elephant Mountain to watch the sunset silhouetted by the Taipei 101 Tower. Yesterday, Steve coded and Ken went to work while Kara and I walked along the lovely riverside park they live near, and bought some fun summer dresses at Gongguan near National Taiwan University. And today, we visited Yongle fabric market and goggled over fun patterns and gorgeous bolts of cloth. Steve and I also took time in the morning to go see Yehliu Geology Park to the northwest of Taipei near Keelung, which my mom had recommended. It was all gorgeous, and we’re a little exhausted from all our travels and explorations. We nearly haven’t enough energy left to see Hong Kong, and miss our dog and a stable lifestyle not a little bit.

I think it’s fair to say at this point that we will be back. Eventually, this blog will become a chronicle of our time living in Taiwan, which would be really nice and different. =) Our hope is that next summer, after I graduate with my master’s degree, we will move to Taipei and find jobs here for both of us. While I don’t know how long that will be for, what’s certain is that this is a wonderful country with a great culture, environment, climate, and excellent cost of living that we would love to be a part of. Goodbye isn’t really goodbye, Taiwan. We’ll miss those hot pots and teas for the year, but come next summer, we’re planning on being here again. See you then!

Connie

The true treasures of China.

When we came up to Taipei, I asked my dad for a little bit of advice on what he thought was worth seeing. After all, my parents did visit Taiwan this March after the Lunar New Year, in part to see what in the world I had been raving about! When asked for the one touristy spot we should see if we had time, he confirmed that we should visit the National Palace Museum. To explain what the National Palace Museum is necessitates a detour into Chinese and Taiwanese history…

Us in front of the National Palace Museum.
Us in front of the National Palace Museum.

Behind Tiananmen Gate in Beijing is the entrance to the Forbidden City, where the Palace Museum of China is to be found. Housed in the old palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Palace Museum holds all sorts of precious artifacts, textiles, porcelains, and works of art and history from China’s thousands of years of history. Except that is, some of the best examples. In 1948, when the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek were about to lose to the Communists and Mao Zedong, they retreated to Taiwan and took the best selection of artifacts from the Palace Museum with them. Most of those artifacts remain in Taiwan today, housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Some say this was a good thing, because during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), many of China’s artifacts were destroyed by Chinese people themselves. The Palace Museum in Beijing barely escaped the same sort of destruction, thanks to guards specifically deployed to protect it.

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Night and Day: a two-part travel post.

Night is the Twilight Zone

When you are on a plane, in transit between cities or between countries, a funny thing happens. You also find your mind between places. It is not exactly occupied with the regular things you think about while heading to work, nor busy in contemplation of where you are going and the days or weeks to come. For me, the strangest thoughts drift through my mind – conversations from years ago, childhood memories almost forgotten… just as I am in-between places, so are my thoughts.

Flights, especially ones during the middle of the night, lend themselves to different experiences. You have never truly appreciated solitude until a stewardess has hawked luxury perfume to you at 2 am when all you want to do is close your eyes to oblivion, but sleep will not come. The alertness reminds you of other late nights, where there is no noble objective to be achieved, like a paper to be finished or someone to be taken care of, but simply to plod on and on until daylight. To simply endure.

Flights are boring. You are strapped to a snug seat, and asked to revert to your best behavior as a ten year-old (smile, follow directions, and do not ask questions). We are cattle, we are burden simply to be transported. The babies and small children have not yet learned that it does no good to cry about it, and if it did offer some small comfort from the cold and the boredom of this horrible stupor, we adults, too, would be howling.

Continue reading Night and Day: a two-part travel post.

Chilly Taipei: unexpected heights, sights, and hikes.

On Tuesday, we boarded the HSR (high-speed rail) outside of Tainan and speeded into Taipei barely an hour and a half later. This is the way to travel! It felt just like the bullet trains we’d taken in Japan, and made for an ultra smooth ride. We trekked our way with heavy bags through the unreasonable cold to Da’an District, where we had reserved five nights in a hostel. That evening, I made Steve stay up with me to debate how to travel about in Thailand and reserved a few hostels and flights before we fell asleep.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, we left our hostel for the Taipei 101 Tower, just a 20-minute walk away. Once you get onto Xinyi Road, which cuts east-west, it is hard to miss the Tower because it looms over everything else for dozens of blocks. For comparison purposes, the Sears (never the Willis) Tower in Chicago is 442 meters tall, and Taipei 101 Tower is significantly taller at 509 meters. (Though both are small potatoes compared to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at a lofty 828 meters.) We took the fastest elevator in the world (deceptively labeled “a life-changing experience” according to a quote from CNN in the lobby) and emerged onto the 89th floor, a 360 degree viewing observatory. It was a beautiful day to see Taipei — slightly cloudy, but not oppressively so. Taipei lies in a basin on the very northern tip of Taiwan, and we could see mountains in several directions as well as a city (Taoyuan, maybe?) to the southwest on an elevated plateau, surrounding the sprawling metropolitan area.

Continue reading Chilly Taipei: unexpected heights, sights, and hikes.

Let’s import Asian toilets, stop lights, and subway systems.

While living in Asia means that we have to do without some Western amenities (like an oven), Steve and I have gotten quite used to a few innovative things here. We’ve also learned that necessity is truly the mother of invention. Asian cities are some of the world’s most densely packed places, and constrained natural resources and space made these innovations not only helpful but necessary.

One of the first things that we saw in Japan (literally) was a toilet with a small faucet and sink on top. We were at our host Ken’s house, and I swore up and down I’d get a photo, and of course, I forgot, but luckily, plenty of other people online have documented these toilets. Much like some European houses, Japanese toilets tend to be in a different room from your sink and shower business, so to make it easy for you, when you flush, the water comes out of the faucet. You can wash your hands, and the dirty water will flow directly into filling the tank. Pretty brilliant. My family uses a number of water-saving techniques in the bathroom, but it’d just be simpler if versatile water usage were the norm that we strived towards!

sink
Some Japanese toilets have their own faucets and sinks. Brilliant! (Source: Essential Japan Guide)

Continue reading Let’s import Asian toilets, stop lights, and subway systems.

Terrible Apartment Photos: Taiwan Edition

In the course of apartment hunting in Taipei and now Kaohsiung, Steve and I have frequented Tealit.org, Kaohsiung Connect, and the all-powerful 591.com, which has listings in Chinese. The apartment quality has decidedly been of a mixed variety, since some are very old and shabby looking, but the location and cost go a long way to making up for it. However, aside from seeing some horrible apartments, we’ve also encountered some atrocious crimes against photography.

Great photos in an online listing can help you gloss over an apartment’s flaws or highlight its strengths. Bad photos, however, can put off prospective tenants, or worse, waste their time by making them laboriously puzzle out what the photo is actually of and where that furniture or wall is situated in relation to the other photos. It’s also exasperating because the number of faux pas seem innumerable and so easily avoidable: if you want to make your apartment look nice, photograph it during the day for maximum daylight. Stand still while taking a photo instead of dancing around. Don’t use flash directly in front of a window. Why is it so difficult to take a nice, wide-angled shot of a room? Even more landlords are preoccupied with giving you detailed photos of the bathroom sink from five different angles, what the hot water heater or laundry machine look like, and how many independent electric meters there are on the wall. All we want is to understand what an apartment looks like or would feel like to live in, and these photos have been so ridiculously unhelpful to that end that we felt the need to compile an album of the worst offenders.

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Rainy Taiwan, and the hazards of funemployment.

I hardly know how to express our first glimpse of Taiwan. Since touching down on Friday morning, it has been almost rainy nonstop, thanks to the end of the typhoon season. Taipei has been a whirlwind of good things to eat and, well, humidity and rain. Since we plan to stay in Taiwan for several months, Steve and I spent the last 48-72 hours madly searching for an apartment online, cold-calling Taiwanese landlords, and riding the Taipei MRT to the ends of the earth (okay, just to Xinbeitou, but it was like 45 minutes out!). Though we found quite a few interesting places, met some nice people, and considered seven different places, the overall rent seemed rather high for what we knew other people were paying in Taipei, and we spent not a few hours hotly debating the merits of various apartments, the point of staying in Taipei versus other cities in the south, and essentially, subtly questioning each other’s motives for being abroad, period. I mean, what are we really doing here?

This morning, we made a trek to see another very expensive apartment, made an appointment to sign a lease for a place, had a change of heart about the cost, cancelled it, and at noon today, found ourselves sitting in the Taipei Main MRT station with all our luggage, back at square one, wondering “what do we do next?”

Continue reading Rainy Taiwan, and the hazards of funemployment.