Finding An Apartment In Taiwan

Finding an apartment in Taiwan was not as easy as we thought it might be- and we never thought it would be easy. The rental system here requires that the renters pay the first months' rent plus 2 additional months' rent as a deposit. Unless you can find an apartment through a personal connection you would probably have to go through a rental agency and they generally charge an additional months' rent as their service fee. Though the cost of rent here is much lower than at home, it still adds up when you're multiplying it by 3 or 4 as a start-up cost.


When we first arrived in Taiwan we stayed at the dorms on the campus of the school where Mel works. Although we always knew this was temporary and it was *free*, it got old pretty fast. We knew that we wouldn't be staying in the same room ahead of time, which was okay as a short-term thing. Since the lads and the ladies had separate floors, we bought ourselves a set of walkie talkies to keep in touch. Mel's room had a private shower and bathroom with a rock hard bed, while I shared washroom facilities with the students and slept on an air mattress that turned out to be more comfortable than Mel's bed. The more unlivable features of dorm life were of course not revealed to us until we arrived. Despite what the recruiters said, there were no kitchen facilities, so every meal had to be bought and there was a 10pm curfew. Even on weekends! Even when there were no students due to an H1N1 outbreak! And one night they randomly decided to close the gates at 9:30 without telling us, so we had to break in. I'm pretty sure that was our last night living there.


After a few days in Taiwan we found out that an apartment across the road from the school had become available because a former teacher had moved out. Because we didn't know where I would be working, we kind of held off on the decision for a while. We thought we'd live in Banchio, the next town over (about 10 mins on the bus) so that we'd be on the subway line for easy access to any potential places of employment. We started visiting rental agents, like the smiley fellow above, but just as we couldn't speak much Mandarin they couldn't speak much English and 8 out of 10 agencies laughed us right out the door! At one agency we spoke to a guy who went inside to see if any of his co-workers could speak enough English to help us and I saw him physically push another guy towards the door to speak to us! Then another guy offered us a place the size of a shoebox for a price at the upper echelon of our budget. We had gotten really frustrated with dorm life and really frustrated with rental agencies.



So we decided to look at the apartment across from the school. The schools' guidance counselor, who had lived there 2 years prior, introduced us to the owners/potential neighbors. The apartment was much larger than I would have pictured an Asian apartment being- it had a bathtub (also rare here) and the landlords spoke perfect English. As well, they only wanted one month's deposit and the price was right- about $200 each per month. We've been here for about a week and have done a lot of cleaning- the last people that lived here were DIRTY, but we are 100% happy with our place. Please enjoy a tour of the place by watching the above video. It's going to be a comfortable base for our adventures this year and it's so nice to be able to stay up past 10pm! If anyone out there is ever in the DaGuan Road area, you should drop by for a visit.