positives and negatives
I wrote this in answer to someone else's post, but I thought maybe some of you'd be interested in it too. I've made a list of the positives and negatives of Taiwan. Please bear in mind these are only impressions I've got in my 4 months, and I may be wrong, since I can't communicate that great at the moment.
Positives: It's far more convenient - with pretty much everything you need within walking distance (as long as you live in the city, which is pretty much everywhere) The countryside isn't too hard to get to, and transport is really cheap and doable. Food is cheap too, and if you're single, it's actually extremely economically viable to eat out or get takeaways (lunch boxes) every meal time. I only keep snacks and breakfast in the kitchen :P I want to change that in a bit simply because it's a bit more healthy to cook your own though. The countryside is stunning and fascinating. There's loads of stuff about this culture I still want to know about.
Negatives: Dating is pretty difficult to impossible for western women - if you want close companionship that is, as opposed to sex. Westerners are too headstrong and independent for a lot of the Taiwanese apparently, and most of the western guys are off looking for those hot Asian women who will treat him like a king. A good chunk of the western guys I've met here aren't very attractive anyway - some of them are blatantly rude to the culture of Taiwan and just seem to want to use and abuse it :( Obviously for me, It is 10 times harder to do things often because I can't speak Chinese and most people around here don't speak english. It does give me plenty of real life practice at getting myself understood though. It also seems non- girly girls are kinda looked down on. Certainly at work I think they want me to wear dresses more and do stuff with my appearance, yet there is a male teacher I observed whose shirt was hanging out, hadn't brushed his hair and looked positively scruffy. sexually appealing girls are often portrayed as being really young, which I don't like very much - it just seems a bit perverted... but then I guess there are echoes of that in western culture as well.
Positives: It's far more convenient - with pretty much everything you need within walking distance (as long as you live in the city, which is pretty much everywhere) The countryside isn't too hard to get to, and transport is really cheap and doable. Food is cheap too, and if you're single, it's actually extremely economically viable to eat out or get takeaways (lunch boxes) every meal time. I only keep snacks and breakfast in the kitchen :P I want to change that in a bit simply because it's a bit more healthy to cook your own though. The countryside is stunning and fascinating. There's loads of stuff about this culture I still want to know about.
Negatives: Dating is pretty difficult to impossible for western women - if you want close companionship that is, as opposed to sex. Westerners are too headstrong and independent for a lot of the Taiwanese apparently, and most of the western guys are off looking for those hot Asian women who will treat him like a king. A good chunk of the western guys I've met here aren't very attractive anyway - some of them are blatantly rude to the culture of Taiwan and just seem to want to use and abuse it :( Obviously for me, It is 10 times harder to do things often because I can't speak Chinese and most people around here don't speak english. It does give me plenty of real life practice at getting myself understood though. It also seems non- girly girls are kinda looked down on. Certainly at work I think they want me to wear dresses more and do stuff with my appearance, yet there is a male teacher I observed whose shirt was hanging out, hadn't brushed his hair and looked positively scruffy. sexually appealing girls are often portrayed as being really young, which I don't like very much - it just seems a bit perverted... but then I guess there are echoes of that in western culture as well.