Job Discussion Forums

[Gawain]

I�m Californian and taught 3 years in Taipei. I see a dozen recent naive newbie forum posts re Taiwan. Let me clue you in:

Newbies: You MUST read all posts in this forum. Dave�s ESL Cafe Forum is worth its weight in gold! It is your best resource for truth! You MUST read hundreds of these forum posts.

Taiwan is NOT a slacker backpacker opium den! Taiwan is JAPAN! Even China these days is Japan! Visa rules MUST be obeyed. You MUST have education and documents and a few thousand USD budget to get started. Go to Buenos Aires if you want to backpack, nature hike, get stoned in youth hostels, work illegally without paying taxes, overstay visitor visa. Taipei is ALL BUSINESS�Taiwan ain�t Argentina!

DO NOT ACCEPT CONTRACT JOB OFFER BEFORE ARRIVAL. You will hate the lousy hours and lousy pay once you realize that ten other bushibans in your neighborhood pay more and have better hours. There are tons of schools to choose from. Easy to get work when you show up in person wearing a tie.

BRING ALL ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS. You need ORIGINAL stamped copy of your College Diploma, Bachelor�s, Master�s even better. Try to bring several ORGINAL stamped documents of diploma and everything. Once a school takes your ORIGINAL diploma and documents, you won�t see them again and will be unable to apply anywhere else. You definitely need Original Diploma, Police Good Conduct letter, and a dozen other ORIGINAL STAMPED documents mentioned in other postings.

You cannot work illegally as a backpack drifter for more than three months. Visitor visa is three months. You must go to police station to renew the visa. They are strict. If you mess up you get deported. If you intend to teach for a year, you MUST be legal with an ARC card, and the ARC card (work permit) requires all those original documents.

BUT the good news is that unlike South America where it is impossible to get a work visa, it is VERY EASY to get a work permit in Taiwan. There is no excuse not to have one. You are being watched. Taiwan is VERY advanced, like Japan. Police station, visa office, and airport all are wired to the same computer tracking your records. If you blow off all legal requirements, work for cash and don�t pay tax, overstay your visa, you may miss your flight out of Taiwan, because the airport will throw you into jail until you pay tax and explain yourself.

One time the police almost arrested me because they thought I was working illegally on a visitor visa without a work permit�I was indeed! And I sweated bullets for three hours as my Taiwanese girlfriend pleaded for them to stamp my visitor visa one last time. Lesson learned. I got an ARC card work permit with ELSI after that. Beware! I had original college transcripts but no original diploma, and they REFUSED to give me a work permit! I almost got deported again! I was forced to spend a hundred USD calling my college long distance begging them to Fedex my original diploma. For another month I was sweating bullets waiting. Finally I got the ARC work permit. But the hours and pay totally sucked. So I quit and flew back to USA. All that hassle for nothing.

You do need a college diploma. Credentials matter. My TEFL certificate definitely helped me get work, and gave me the skills needed to be a good teacher. If you are at all serious, you MUST get a TEFL. Law of supply and demand: Schools will not hire you without a college degree when there are a dozen other backpacker candidates who do have degrees.

You should speak some Chinese. Backpacker can get by without Chinese because Taiwanese are friendly and patient and stumble through poor English, similar to my experience in the Philippines. At least learn survival phrases, and try to pronounce the 4 accents!

Teaching hours suck. Morning kids class, maybe noon adults, then evening adults or kids, with the majority of your day WASTED AND UNPAID. That drove me nuts. Lucky to get 20 paid hours a week. Even paid hours in Taipei only NT550 or about USD17. That�s why I quit. You can fill out the hours with private lessons at USD25, but you have to have a talent for finding clients, which I don�t. I stumbled into a few private clients, up to USD30, but they didn�t last.

Cost of living is slightly cheaper than California. Overall, each year I only saved a few thousand USD, yet never had time to take vacations, but that didn�t matter because there was nowhere worth visiting.

Teachers come to Taipei to make money. Taipei is a huge noisy megalopolis with nothing else to do but make money. Imagine ten New York Cities on top of each other. That�s Taipei.

Taiwan should be a beautiful tropical island, but it is overpopulated. Every valley is saturated with teeming masses and traffic jams. Most mountains and beaches have no access, and many are off limits as military posts to fend off Chinese invasion. Mountains surrounding Taipei are full of deadly snakes. Beaches surrounding Taipei are pristine because the military forbids you to visit them, or full of broken glass and garbage because the public beaches have no maintenance budget. Formosa, beautiful island, yeah right! There are more taxis and noisy motor scooters in Taipei than anywhere else on earth, and they all pollute a thick smog over Taipei. Sky never blue in Taipei. Tam Shway River in Taipei is opaque with pollution.

Everyone boils water using big water boilers in every apartment, for reasons never made clear. Some say boiling kills pathogens and parasites. Others say that is nonsense because the water treatment chlorine kills everything, and boiling actually boils away the excess chlorine. Either way, no one drinks raw water. BUT Taipei has tons of 711 and Circle K convenience stores on every corner where you can get any food and any drink cheap.

With no nature and nothing to do, Taipeiren focus on good food, cable TV, and money. I lived with my girlfriend in a fantastic big luxurious apartment much better than anything I ever had in USA. Apartment buildings are dreary and caked black with motor scooter soot on the outside, but on the inside, many Taiwanese have beautiful apartments. Yes the food is delicious! Excellent satellite cable TV. With nothing else to do in my off hours, I watched tons of HBO, CINEMAX, IFC, STARWORLD, VH1, MTV, CNN, BBC, everything on earth, on bigscreen TV.

Traffic is awful due to taxi and motor scooter overpopulation and they ignore all traffic laws. Walking across the street in marked intersection with the light, I was almost run over a dozen times by turning taxi drivers who refused to brake. Riding these taxis, I had four different drivers get fender benders and fistfight other drivers. My rush-hour bus ran over a motor scooter. Riders get killed every day. BE CAREFUL!

Best kept secrets in Taipei:
Your windows need screens because Taiwan has a trillion mosquitoes, but don�t break your wrists slapping your walls in desperate attempts to kill mosquitoes, as I did my whole first year. That stained my walls with my own blood because those #$%#% mosquitoes all had my blood in them! Use a handheld mosquito zapper! Looks like a tennis racquet, uses regular battery. Just wave it over them as they fly past. ZAP! They fall dead! Extremely effective! No more broken wrists or blood on walls!

Use the MRT Taipei Metro train! It is excellent, cheap, gets you everywhere! Don�t go crazy in Taipei traffic. Buses are good but crowded and take forever in gridlock. MRT train literally flies above the gridlock! In 3 years it was always on time and never let me down!

Well, there it is. Every golden good balanced by a dreary bad. Taiwan EFL teaching ain�t no backpacker paradise! But the Taiwanese are just sweet enough to make me melancholy whenever I think about my wonderful smiling students, adults and kids, and my awesome girlfriend! I do miss them! Bittersweet experience. �It�s a lot like life!�

[TaoyuanSteve]

Wow! Nice post. Should've been in the job info journals, though IMO. Too bad this one'll slip off the first page eventually. Good work.

[Fortigurn]

Great post, should be a sticky.

I'll add a few caveats because mileage varies, especially when people's cultural backgrounds are different.

[clark.w.griswald]

I also agree that the overall content of the post if pretty accurate. I would however like to point out a couple of inaccuracies, in addition to the ones that Fortigurn has already mentioned.

[Gawain]

Word. Yes all you newbies definitely read the thread above me. I agree with your criticism of me.

Metaphysics teaches that reality is relative. Perception depends on perspective. As a militant atheist anti-Christian, I agree with Nietzsche.

Taiwan might be a backpacker's paradise for a young flexible backpacker, with or without a TEFL or degree. But I was in my late 30's when I was there, and not at all flexible.

You're right. Watching HBO was a waste of time when I should have been partaking in the culture. But the traffic freaked me out and I suffered severe culture shock.

My Taiwanese girlfriend drove me along the northeast coast beaches and I kept yelling "Stop the car! That beach is beautiful!" And she kept yelling, "Military own beach! We get shot!" She parked at a lousy beach full of people, and a shoreline that was nothing but broken glass, a rusted car in the surf, an old mattress, dozens of car batteries-- their public beach was literally a dump. I stood there screaming at my pretty panda "What the hell is the matter with you people! This beach should be Waikiki and you made it a dump! You gits!" I was such an a%$%$#! I complained about everything nonstop my whole time there.

"We got to go to the mountains! I need nature NOW! I can't take Taipei anymore!" I shouted. Girlfriend yelled, "You will hate mountains! Full of poison snakes!" I forced her to drive me. We parked and took barely 100 steps on the moutain trail when a big snake slithered practically over my shoes. "AAAAAAHHH!" my girlfriend screamed, "That's the 100 Step Snake! It bite you, you take 100 steps and fall dead!" I had to admit she told me so. We drove home and watched HBO.

I agree with you, 20 hours is plenty of teaching hours. An hour of teaching requires half hour prep so that was 30 hours work, and waiting around doing nothing was another 10 hours, so 20 hours paid is actually a 40 hour week!

But 20 hours is not enough money to live well-- I was expecting to live as the Great White Father among the little yellow people, a British East Indies Company Raj! Didn't work out that way!

Our rent for our big beautiful apartment that my girlfiend's dad signed for, was almost the same rent I was paying in San Francisco. 2 Bedrooms = USD1,000 month. We split half, USD500 each. You can't teach 20 hours and pay that and save a penny.

My girlfriend wanted her American greencard from me. She wanted me to pay half of all her luxurious furniture which she kept buying over my loud protests. You get the picture. She now lives in San Francisco, married to someone else. She just had a baby. We still email every week. You get the picture. Glad I don't have that ball 'n chain!

I was under much more pressure in Taiwan than some backpacker who sails in using teaching as a way to pay for global travel. To such a young adventurer, I say you'll love Taiwan.

Word to all EFL teachers everywhere: Don't get in over your head with furniture and leases and lovers. Freedom above all! Ramble on!

Culture Shock really messed my head in Taiwan. By the end I ate only McDonalds and watched only HBO, until I gave up and flew away.

Beware of Culture Shock!
Here�s a couple great articles on Culture Shock:

http://www.johnsesl.com/templates/reading/cultureshock/

http://www.britishexpat.com/expat_services/cultureshock.htm

Zaijian!

[TaoyuanSteve]

Thank you for your thoughtful and entertaining posts. It's a pleasure to read about your experiences here.

I think you maybe had some chance encounters with snakes, because I have found they are not so common. Even when you do see them, they won't bother you if you don't bother them. I hike in some trails near YinGe. I have seen some snakes, notably the lime green bamboo snake, but not too often. It's too bad you didn't go to a few more places. Also, if you get high up enough, the climate no longer suits most of the venomous species. Really quite a difference in environment in some of the higher regions: evergreens as opposed to palms that would be found in the lowlands.

I'll have a look at the links you provided. You are very right. Culture shock is something to watch out for.

[crespo]

I found your description of the beach rather humorous, Gawain. I recall returning home from a trip down south and I decided to simply head west from the number 3 highway until I hit hit the coast. It was difficult as most of it was blocked off because of the military bases. They were friendly enough, however and they told us how to get to the beach. The sun was setting and it had been a lovely day and so I was rather excited...ohhh how disillusioned i became. the beach was not a beach, but a rubbish dump that stretched for miles. I'm still amazed at how the Taiwanese treat this island. There are, however, some wonderful beaches along the east coast. Incidentally, i've done a fair bit of hiking and I've yet to encounter a snake. I find the Taiwanese slightly paranoid about everythinig (crime, wildlife, blacks, speaking english, doing anything independently, etc.) so I wouldn't take their fear for much.
If you're still around, Gaiwan...i'd totally encourage a trip to the mountains in the south with your gf. great stuff!

christopher

[Gawain]

Can't resist responding! Let me repeat: Perception depends on perspective. Life is what you make it.

I don't want to scare any backpackers away from Taiwan. You'll probably love it.

Just be sure to read my CULTURE SHOCK links above! Muy Importante! The Enchantment phase is nice but the Rejection phase can be severe if you are stuck in Taipei.

Beaches: You are right. Find out which beaches are really nice before you go. I DID get down to famous Kenting Beach in Kaoshung. That was very nice, like Waikiki.

My mistake was assuming I could read a map like a soldier and drive to the sands and assume I'd find a nice beach. WRONG! HUGE CULTURE SHOCK: Taiwanese don't care about beaches. Surfing never caught on in Taiwan, even though it is at same latitude as Hawaii! Sunbathing never caught on because Southeast Asians view dark skin as the sign of an outdoor laborer. Mandarin Chinese bone white skin is the beauty aesthetic!

You are right. Taiwanese use beautiful beaches as garbage dumps not only due to overpopulation: Taiwanese are TOTALLY superstitious about EVERYTHING. They ALL believe in GHOSTS! My girlfriend admitted that the reason why she refused to drive me to a beach in July was because July is the GHOST MONTH when ghosts haunt the beaches!!!

My girlfriend was always claiming to see ghosts! She even covered up our beautiful floor-length mirror with a sheet because she kept seeing ghosts in the mirror! She would burn incense and ghost money in our apartment despite my loud protests.

She is now married in San Francisco. She just emailed me photos of her baby. Frankly, it never would have worked between us. Too many culture differences. She always wanted American Greencard and family. I am so happy for her. She did realize her American Dream despite being chained to an a$#%$% like me for five years! Good for her!

So there are cultural reasons why the Taiwanese never recognized that their beaches COULD be as wonderful and profitable as Waikiki!

SNAKES: You are right. Most hikers will never see a snake. At least not until a 30-ft boa drops from the trees onto their head and swallows them alive!

My adult students told me the reason why the mountains around Taipei are supposedly full of deadly snakes like the "100 Step Snake." Japanese in WWII built command posts in these mountains. They imported every deadly snake in Southeast Asia, cobras and every kind of pit viper. They milked their venom to produce anti-venom vials they could ship to their battlefield hospitals everywhere from Burma to the Philippines. As a parting gesture when MacArthur kicked them off Formosa, the Japanese released all these snakes into the mountains! Being Buddhist, the Taiwanese never believed in snake roundups or pest poisoning like US Fish and Game. In Texas they do annual rattlesnake roundups and chop all their heads off! Not so in Taiwan.

That said, who the hell knows the truth? How many deadly snakes are there? Don't let me discourage backpackers from hiking. Just BE CAREFUL.

ANOTHER BEST KEPT SECRET: Fly to Pacific Islands for vacations! When I needed a vacation, I just had my Taiwanese girlfriend call her travel agent to GET OUT OF TAIWAN. That was a great cure for my culture shock. Dozens of Pacific Islands are near Taiwan and offer cheap wonderful vacations. We took three weeks, a week in PALAU, a week in SAIPAN, a week in GUAM, total less than USD1,000. Also a week in CEBU, the Philippines, cheap and wonderful!

Visit Pacific Islands! They rule! Polynesians and Micronesians are wonderful. Great coral reefs in Palau. Great beaches in Saipan. Guam is American and feels like Santa Monica. Cebu has great cheap resorts. You are right: TRAVEL!

Now stuck in USA, I savor my bittersweet memories of Taiwan and my pretty panda, and I can only quote the wisdom of Kenny Rogers:

"You got to know when to hold 'em,
know when to fold 'em,
know when to walk away,
know when to run!
You never count your winnings,
when you're sittin' at the table,
there'll be time enough for counting,
when the dealing's done!"

[clark.w.griswald]