We are leaving Taiwan at the end of next month (March 29th). By the time we leave we will have been here 6 months. It's probably not a massive amount of time to live somewhere in the grand scheme of things but it seems like a long time to me.
It's been a pretty big six months for us after all. It's the first time I've lived abroad (I'd never even been to Asia before this), first time I've worked as a teacher and it's the longest time I've worked in the same job - in fact it's my first 'proper' job really. (It's also the first time myself and Katie have lived together, so that's also been a pretty big deal).
Obviously, living in a place for this long will mean you build up a fondness for things. We have missed lots of different stuff from home during our stay here but there will undoubtedly be things we'll miss about Taiwan. It's funny the relationships you can build when you live in a different culture.
When we first arrived everything was completely alien to us, I mean the language doesn't even have letters in their alphabet!
At least, if we lived in Europe or South America somewhere we might be able to guess what some stuff meant. But we literally did not have a clue what anything was when we got here (we're not a whole lot better now I have to admit). This made ordering food a massive problem and for the first few days we were kinda too scared to go into a new restaurant.
As much as you say "I'll just choose something randomly and I'll eat whatever it is", when it comes down to it you're not that brave. We definitely weren't anyway. We have since tried that on a few occasions but it has not been a wildly successful venture - for every delicious experience like sweet and sour fish there are at least two equally disgusting failures, like deep fried snails or some kind of stomach. In the first couple of days we didn't venture much further than 7/11 and we were struggling.
One day we passed a restaurant that was absolutely packed and looked like it had a nice buzz to it. We stopped and discussed going in. When we looked up, the people working inside were madly waving at us to come in. Thinking it would be a crushing disappointment for them if we walked off, we went in.
Our love affair with the Birdy Place had begun.
(I should have mentioned in my food post that the stuff we get here is nothing similar to Chinese at home. We can get fried rice which is similar and we have sweet and sour fish but the other stuff is completely different. I think a lot of what you get at home is Cantonese style but we don't get things like that here.)
The Birdy Place is probably the best Asian food I've ever had. It's pretty simple stuff and dirt cheap (dinner for me and Katie for 4 Euro) but it's just delicious. It was the first proper meal we'd had since we arrived and actually made us feel so much more at ease. The effect food can have on you is immense, so that's probably a major reason why we love this place so much. But the people who work there are also really nice and love seeing us come in.
They've even started throwing a few free things our way in the last while as a reward for coming back or something. It's been a really big hit with the other foreign teachers and loads of them go in all the time now. I think that's another reason why we love it so much - we discovered it and other people like it!
It sounds childish but 'the experience' kind of becomes competitive in a situation like this which always make you want to find new things and kind of brag about it. It sounds really petty when I see it written down like that……
Anyway, the Birdy Place is amazing and WE discovered it!!!!
The dinner we always order from the Birdy Place is one we'll definitely miss when we leave. Dry noodles with curry (gali mien) for me, beef noodles (new row mien) for Katie and leek or shrimp dumplings (sway jow) to share - absolutely class. And so cheap. The week before we got paid the first time we were absolutely skint. It was sick. So we had to budget loads. That meant eating from the Birdy Place every night for a week basically. And the food still didn't get old!!*
Something that's gonna sound completely bizarre to everyone home is the concept of Pearl Tea (chen chew nai cha). They love their tea here, I mean LOVE it. Almost more than they love their families as far as I can see. There is tea shops everywhere and they're always fairly busy. You can get all kinds of tea with loads of different flavors and different things put into it etc etc etc. The menu in a tea place is about twice as long as the menu in a restaurant. But our favorite one and, apparently a Taiwanese speciality, is Pearl Tea a.k.a. Bubble Tea.
My favorite is iced because it doesn't taste so sweet. It is amazingly refreshing though and works really well as a desert. From what I've heard, it's incredibly fattening so we've tried to limit our intake. It is so so so so nice though and I'm gonna miss it so much. Our friend from America said that you can get them in America now so hopefully the phenomenon will arrive in Ireland in the future. Then everyone can enjoy the deliciousness!
A pretty obvious thing we're gonna miss is how cheap it is here compared to Ireland. Big brand name things like iPods and HTCs are only marginally cheaper because those companies usually have global pricing. But just day to day living is so much cheaper. The fact we can get dinner for both of us for less than 4 euro most nights should speak for itself. Eating out is dirt cheap and buying from stalls is even cheaper.
Buying beer from a shop is only a bit cheaper than home but drinking in a bar is a good deal cheaper. Most beers are around 2 euro - not the ridiculously low levels of some countries but still better than home. Whiskey is really, really cheap for some reason but because it's not very popular, wine is fairly expensive.
Grocery shopping is pretty cheap and so is buying clothes - particularly if you're buying Taiwanese brands. In general, buying Taiwanese is cheap. I got a decent 4gb MP3 player for 40 quid and we got a 4gb memory card for the camera for about 6 quid - both Taiwanese brands.
Another major thing that is cheap is public transport. A train from Jhunan to Hsinchu (our nearest city) is 28NT, which is 70 cent. The train from here to Taipei (around 2 hours away) is around 200NT - a fiver. The largest amount we've paid for a journey is on the High Speed Rail from Kaoishung to Hsinchu. The journey takes about 4 and a half hours by regular train but you can do it in an hour and a half on the HSR. This is the most expensive train in the country and it cost us around 25 quid each.
And do you know what else is weird? The trains run on time. Crazy isn't it? The board says a train will arrive at 3:30 and it does! It's just so convenient to know when you read a timetable it's actually accurate. Not like when you wait for a bus to Dublin, it doesn't come until an hour after it's meant you, then you ask the driver why he's an hour late only to be informed that it's actually the NEXT bus coming 20 minutes early! Where did the other one go??
Even if the train is going to be late, a message will pop up on the board saying it will be 7 minutes late. The train will arrive exactly 7 minutes late. Even when it's late it's on time!
The MRT in Taipei is also a really good mode of transport and really cheap. It operates similarly to the Underground in London and the most you pay for any journey is 40NT I think, which is around a euro. Again, they're frequent, clean and well organized.
I'm really not looking forward to battling my way around Ireland by public transport when we get back.
The last thing I'll mention about what we'll miss is completely ridiculous and makes us sound like such ignorant, Western pigs. But it's funny. It shows off all of our laziness and prejudice in one sentence but I still love it:
Living in a country where nobody understands you makes it soooo easy to talk about them even when you're right beside them.
Now, I know this sounds terrible but sometimes you see weird stuff in Taiwan and really want to comment on it. If we were at home, this would be difficult and obvious. But over here, we can just let rip and slag people off without them knowing a thing! It's great craic! The main reason this has developed is because of all the staring, We feel that if people unashamedly stare at us then we have a right to talk about them and, ultimately, judge them. It's our right.
However, you can obviously be caught out because the level of English is actually relatively high here. It's kind of poor in our town but usually on trains and stuff there will be people who can speak English. This means that myself and Katie have rekindled our love of Gaeilge.
This way we can have a nice chat in the knowledge that no one can understand us. It would be fairly surprising to meet a Taiwanese person who spoke Irish. I know they work hard but that would be a bit ridiculous!
Well, that's just a few things that we'll definitely miss from Taiwan. I'm sure there's definitely others that I've forgotten to mention but it's all I can think of right now.
I might also do a post on the stuff we won't miss because that'd be funny and pretty long. Loads of ridiculous things happen over here that can be really infuriating but it's all part of living abroad. I'm sure there are endless things that happen in Ireland which would completely frustrate a Taiwanese person - that's just the way of things!
*Note: None of the attempted Chinese stuff in this post is remotely close to being correctly spelled - I just typed it as closed to it sounds as possible.
