It’s possible to find a place with Craigslist. However, I swear those folks are ripoffs most of the time.

If you’ve got some Chinese speaking friends or are brave, check out http://rent.591.com.tw/. You’ll want 台北縣, Taipei county, for the first drop down and 林口鄉, Linkou township, for the second. Oftentimes, you don’t need to press the search button, the list will auto-update.

On the left column is a price range, you might as well stick in 0 or 1000元 to 10000元 if you’re poor or 20000元 if you want to have the newest modern Western apartment.

The lower-end places are still quite nice and basic living. Once you get here and easily make friends, you’ll not be staying home much except to shower and sleep.

Oh on food, it’s possible to live without a kitchen. My friends who do so report it costing about 10,000元 a month for dining out well for one or moderately for two. In comparison, my grocery budget for two is 8,000元 and we both eat very well.

It’s one of my favorites here in Taiwan.

Thanks

i love your posts! it’s like traveling, but way easier.

My step-dad is a civil engineer, so every family trip turns into a pipe/bridge/tunnel/foundation exploration.

John! Put up some art in your room, or some photos of friends. Tout de suite. I will mail you something if you e-mail me your address. Too much beige is bad for the soul.

p.s. PLEASE BRING ME BACK A SMILE FACE BREAD PLUSHIE KTHXBAI.

Mr. Pitre, I know what you mean about the mundane; my father is a civil engineer by training and often comments on the same things. He worked on the Metro Rapid Transit system here in Taipei and has an amusing story or two about misunderstandings between the German construction firm for which he worked and Taiwanese subcons.

As for Wade-Giles and Pinyin, the former was designed so that English speaking Westerners could approximate sounds made in Chinese. It doesn’t use diacritical marks for the four tones in Mandarin Chinese. Pinyin does use such marks, but goes a step further, assigning specific letter combinations to specific sounds.

Therefore, the letter combinations ‘xi’ and ‘shi’ signify completely different sounds, as do ‘zh’ and ‘ch’, and ‘q’ for that matter. The problem is that although Wade-Giles is severely flawed, it was conceived with Western non-specialist use in mind. Pinyin was conceived as a romanised system to train Chinese children how to speak Chinese and has been used as such in Mainland China since shortly after the end of the civil war. Pinyin is more consistent but if you’ve never taken a Chinese language class, it can be incredibly perplexing. The pronunciations of the words ‘qing’, ‘xiao’ and ‘zhong’ make perfect sense to me but are challenging for my dad, for example.

As for keyboards, there are several ways to approach it. In Taiwan, they use a phonetic system they call ‘bopomofo’ after the four initial sounds of that system. Their keyboards are thus marked with the thirty or so marks. ‘bopomofo’ marks resemble fragments of Chinese characters.

Cangjie, another system, is based on radicals of Chinese characters. Once learned, this is an incredibly fast method of typing in Chinese but I have met very few who learn how to use it properly.

Finally, you can just use Pinyin, or to give it the full title, Hanyu Pinyin. This uses the letters on the keyboard. So, for example, I will type in ‘wo shi’ for ‘I am’; each word brings up a list of possible characters (Chinese is littered with homonyms, particularly if you do not take tone into account, as this typing system does not) and you pick one. A good text entry system offers reasonable options for words, so you don’t have to dally over every single character.

Therefore, the keyboards look like an American keyboard, though the letter keys and number keys have bopomofo symbols and radicals for use in cangjie on each key as well.

Sorry, this went on very long! I hope you don’t mind Sarah!

how long do you plan to be in taiwan?

and thanks for not skipping a food picture. mandatory for posts.

i’m looking forward to taking formal classes in arabic when i move to kuwait. just like you were showing with the written chinese vs the spoken, i feel that it’ll be as important to be able to read arabic as it will be to speak it. although english is definitely more prevalent in kuwait than it appears to be in taipei.