It has been a chaotic couple of weeks, and my efforts to keep track of what has happened have been hampered by circumstance, but things are settling down, and this is my first stab of coalescing my thoughts.
But let’s start at the beginning, because, if you’ve subscribed to this blog and forgot it existed and this little gem just pops up at random in your RSS feed, you don’t know what’s happened.
Short version: My wife, Irene, and I have moved to Taiwan. She has a two-year contract to teach at a highly-rated school here in Hsinchu City. She’ll be teaching in her capacity as a United States degreeded and credentialed elementary teacher.
I, on the other hand, am still just retired and am along for the ride. I’m hoping to finally achieve basic incompentence in speaking Mandarin. Two weeks so far and, as usual, no magic bullet. it’s not just the language, its the social norms — but that’s a topic for another day.
We spent our first two weeks in Taipei, staying with my mother and father in law. It’s great to have a place to stay, but for various reasons, there is no place for me to sit and work at a computer in their home. Writing, podcast editing, and video editing just weren’t practical.
The time was not wasted, though. It gave us the opportunity to get time-synced with Taiwan — although this was by far the easiest time I’ve ever had getting over jet lag in all my travels. Perhaps it’s because I’m old now and have to get up to pee every couple of hours during the night, so, I’m not really on much of a regular sleep schedule anyway.
It also gave Irene time to catch up with her parents, and for us to get back in the groove of Taiwan. On the downside, we also got back into how ridiculously convenient Taipei is.
“Convenient.” That’s a word you’ll hear a lot about Taiwan, but is it true? I’m going to come back to that in a later post, but lets just say that its convenient in some ways, and oh so much harder than it needs to be in other ways.
Now, without too much detail, Irene’s offer in terms of pay and bonuses was competetive (in real, not relative dollars) with teachers’ pay in Arizona, and in relative terms, the total cost of living in Hsinchu is roughly 33% less than Phoenix. Hsinchu is actually quite expensive compared to many other places in Taiwan because of high housing prices. But here’t kicker:
In addition to the pay and bonus package, the job also supplies housing, but we knew almost nothing about where we were going to live until we set foot in the front door except that it was 2-4 bedrooms.
Hsinchu is a much smaller city than Taipei about 30 minutes by High Speed Rail (HSR.) (For reference, the HSR are actually Japanese-built Shinkansens, and they travel at up to 300 kph up and down Taiwan’s west coast.)
Irene grew up in Taipei, and is not very familiar with Hsinchu, although her father grew up here. Everywhere in Taiwan seems to adopt a character, but Hsinchu is the city that has nothing but high-tech workers. It’s a foodie desert, it hasn’t got culture or night life, and public transit is poor. What it has got is Taiwan’s highest-paid workers. Hsinchu is Taiwan’s Silicon Valley, chances are the key components of the device you’re reading this on were made within 2 kms of where I’m sitting.
I had done some internet and AI-assisted sleuthing and actually correctly nailed it down to the next building over from where we are. We’re in the same complex, just next door.
But guessing where you think you’re going to live and knowing are two different things. No knowing was stressful.
We were only given the exact address the night before we needed to give that information to our van driver who brought us down from Taipei.
When we arrived, he was impressed. When we pulled into the neighborhood, he started going, “wow!” To be fair, it is a gorgeous neighborhood. We’re situated near a lake, the streets are all lined with tall trees, and the grounds are all parklike. And while it was built (estimated) in the 1980s or early 1990s and is beginning to show some age, some might argue it’s old enough to begin to have character.
There’s a story to be told about this complex, and I only know parts of it, but it is government housing, and it was designed for “important” government officials with families. It does not look like typical Taiwanese homes. Apart from certain decorative flairs, such as several moon gates, these look like American townhomes. It’s stirkingly incongrous with typical Taiwanese housing, and yet so obviously is.
Time Jump! I should have finished writing this a week ago, but I was thrown a curveball. We thought we were moving down here just 7 days before my wife started work full time, but that was just a few days of basic orientation for new foreign teachers, but then there were two more weeks for the teachers to get settled in to their homes.
I thought I was going to have these last two weeks to myself to pursue my various creative outlets, but instead, we’ve been setting up house.
Despite all the online (actual government info) to the contrary, and the troubles we had at TECO LA, the school has come through and both of us have our residency and ARCs sorted out, with our National Health Insurance (NHI) enrollment being processed now, and expected in a few days.