Living here, explained in English.
The things that are obvious once you know them, and baffling until you do.
Your first week
- 1 Buy an EasyCard at the airport or any MRT station
- 2 Pick up a prepaid SIM so you have a local number
- 3 Start the residency paperwork — everything else waits on it
- 4 Work out your nearest MRT station and which colour line it is on
- 5 Find the nearest clinic and the nearest 24-hour convenience store
- 6 Say yes to the first invitation you get
Getting around
Taipei is small, dense and very well connected. Most people stop using taxis within a month.
- Get an EasyCard first
- A stored-value card that works on the MRT, city buses, YouBike and in convenience stores. Sold at every MRT station.
- The MRT is colour-coded
- Lines are named by colour and numbered by station, so you can navigate without reading Chinese. Trains run from early morning until around midnight.
- Do not eat or drink in the system
- That includes water, and it applies past the gates as well as on the train. It is enforced and it surprises almost every new arrival.
- Buses: tap on, and tap off
- Many routes charge by section, so tapping only once can cost you the wrong fare. Watch what the person in front of you does.
- YouBike for the last kilometre
- Docked bike share across the city. Registration wants a local phone number, which is a good reason to sort the SIM out early.
- Leaving the city
- High Speed Rail runs down the west coast and turns most of the island into a day trip. Slower TRA trains reach the places it does not.
Getting set up
Roughly the order things need to happen in. Each one tends to be asked for by the next.
- Residency comes first
- An ARC — the Alien Resident Certificate — is the document nearly every other service asks to see. Sort it before you try to do anything else.
- Then a phone number
- A prepaid SIM at the airport covers the first weeks. Monthly plans generally want residency, which is why this comes second and not first.
- Then a bank account
- Expect to bring your passport and your ARC, and expect it to take an afternoon rather than ten minutes.
- National Health Insurance
- Taiwan's NHI is the thing residents rave about. Employers usually enrol you; otherwise there is a qualifying period before you can join.
- Find your clinic before you need it
- Neighbourhood clinics handle most things quickly and cheaply, and knowing where yours is beats searching for one while ill.
- Renting
- Deposits of a month or two are normal and much of the market moves through agents and word of mouth rather than listings in English.
Finding your people
The part no checklist covers, and the one that decides whether you stay.
- Language exchange
- The most reliable way to meet people who are not colleagues, and it cuts both ways — everyone in the room is a beginner at something.
- The mountains start at the MRT
- Taipei is ringed by trails that begin within reach of a station. Hiking groups are among the easiest to join cold.
- Volunteering
- Station community work is a standing invitation, and it puts you next to people who already know how everything works.
- Turn up to things
- Station events, quiz nights, open days. Showing up twice is usually the whole trick.
- Night markets are the social default
- Cheap, loud, open late and everywhere. It is where people take you when they do not know what else to suggest.
- Learn ten words of Mandarin
- Not enough to hold a conversation, and that is not the point. It changes how the first thirty seconds of every interaction go.
Know something that belongs here?
Local knowledge is the whole point of a guide like this, and most of it never gets written down.