Now that I’m back in Taiwan, not only do I have some more free time, I also think I have a lot more to say.
Yesterday and today, my friends and I have finished moving out of the apartment in Taichung that I had thought was a bad lease agreement a few weeks ago. In hindsight, I don’t think it was necessarily a scam, I think it was more the inexperience of the landlords that became more and more evident the longer we were living there.
Thursday of last week, our professor (my guarantor on the lease) came with us to meet with the landlords and sign an amendment to the lease that would let us move out with half of our security deposit returned (one month’s rent) before June 15th. That didn’t seem too bad, especially because it took the landlords no convincing at all.
We thought that would be the end of it, but conveniently enough, later the same day we come back to the apartment from work to see that the walls-leaking-water issue had somehow gotten a lot worse over the course of just that day — what had previously just been some puddles on the ground had become an entire hallway covered in standing water and the inside of my friend’s room almost the same. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really ask for the entire deposit back by that point because we had already signed the amendment to the lease.
That night, they made me mop it (which was not very pleasant) and told us not to use the running water in our double room (the main room of the two). I took a shower in the other room after all of the mopping, but the next day we went back to using the water. I mean, it’s Taichung, I need to take showers at least once a day.
And at the end of the same day, the landlords let us know that they’d found that the issue was a broken drainage pipe under our main room. It had a hole in it, and so the water was coming up from a massive standing puddle under our floor. Not only that, but as the issue continued to get worse, water would keep coming up from new places around the wall, and sometimes just from the floor itself, making it look like the floor was starting to sink.
There’s even a massive water stain directly above the front door of the apartment now. And this building is all-new, so this is an issue that they missed and… still haven’t fixed yet. Across our entire time here, they won’t get around to it. I guess it’s convenient that we moved out because of price when we did, but we had a pretty good livability case to make with all this water everywhere, too.
Regardless, we’re out. A reminder not to rent brand-new apartments, then, for reasons of high price (because new is supposed to be desirable) and rooms that have never been lived in before and so have not been tested for major livability concerns, like broken pipes below the floor. I’m not sure how an electrical fire hasn’t started in that building yet.
So now that we’re out of that apartment, we’re back in the university dorms. Since it’s me and two other friends, and all of the dorms are four-person, we almost fill the room, but in our room there’s a singular other bed to be occupied. Fortunately, we moved in yesterday to an empty room with no occupants in the fourth bed. And, since the open rooms were quads with a low bed (which are usually reserved for people who are too tall to fit safely in the high bunks, or people with disabilities who can’t climb the ladders, neither of which are qualifiers that I can make use of), and the low bed is empty, I set my mattress and sheets up on the low bed (I just don’t like sleeping up high). I had talked about wanting one before. Now I technically have one. Nice!
And, our new dorm actually has a door that leads out on to the balcony instead of me having to jump through the window (again, it’s because our room is an accessible room). Although these accessible rooms really are nicer than the regular ones, I don’t feel like having a door that leads me on to the laundry-hanging balcony is really too much of an ask and something that should be reserved for disabled people. Jumping out the window to get to your clothes is kind of dangerous anyway.
For $2250 NTD/month, we’re doing well, then. I will say I think the dorms at this university are much nicer than the dorms were my freshman year in Rochester.
It seems like this experience with my lease and the downtown Taichung apartment are a good example of an expensive lesson (although not as expensive as if this lesson had been learned back at home): read the lease, have more open communication with landlords, look for experienced landlords who aren’t so friendly you suspect they’re hiding something (whether it’s their lack of experience or a hole in the drainage pipe below your floor), and preferably, ask friends who know things about housing in the area you’re trying to move to.
During our new apartment search, I was steered clear of a relatively nice room because I asked a friend from the lab who had a friend who’d lived in it before. Although the landlord is nice enough on first interaction, apparently she’s kind of rude at random, changes the lease halfway through the term (big tech style), charges “variable rates” for electrical and hot water usage (doesn’t have a meter and charges on vibes), and whose grandchild apparently has no manners and loves to bother tenants (he even went through his grandmother’s phone history this morning and called me a few times. I answered, and all I heard was distant and broken Mandopop and no human voices).
So even though it seems like the Wufeng and Dali housing markets leave a lot to be desired, I can couple my personal housing dreams in with the personal career dreams I was already thinking about.
Although I love Taichung, I do think it’s objectively the least-inviting city in Taiwan for foreigners and really doesn’t have a lot of nice tourist attractions, famous landmarks or people, good public transit, or a lot of other things that make me like a city. Which is why, writing this right now, it’s a Saturday and I’m sitting on the seventh floor of the Kaohsiung Public Library looking out a window toward part of a Ya-Wan construction site (this view will probably be better in about ten years, but Taichung’s Blue Line also won’t be done until then anyway, so pick your poison).
The people in Kaohsiung are nicer, the weather and environment are nicer, Taichung is a little bit too much to handle sometimes.
Because my professor is from here and has taken us down more than a few times before, my dad stayed here when he came last year, and this was where I was at midnight on January 1st of this year, I do have a little bit of a sentimental attachment to K-town, too. It definitely punches above its weight as far as second cities go (maybe second by name recognition only: it’s not as large or industrial as Taichung, it’s not as politically or financially influential as Taipei, it’s not as much of a tourist landmark as Tainan, but it is a beautiful city with a cool-looking empty skyscraper and Taiwan’s best tram system).
And, it’s the only city in the south of the island where the mountains run directly to the beach. I was in Keelung last weekend, and Kaohsiung now, and I do really like the atmosphere of mountains-meet-beach with all of the narrow streets (at least, in Gushan and Yancheng) and nice views.
My professor and his wife own properties in almost every city in Taiwan. I’ve always been impressed by that. I don’t know how, since I never wanted to be one of those billionaire rich types, but I kind of aspire to that someday, too. It seems nice to never need to pay for hotels (although Taiwan’s hotel scene is admittedly excellent these days).
Since, at least at the moment, I can definitely not afford to do that, I can dream of coming back to Taiwan for schooling or work or grad school in another city. And right now, Keelung and Kaohsiung are the two cities that I love the most. I can aspire to come back for a photovoltaics or optical engineering program at NTOU, NSYSU, even NTU if I get very lucky.
My new project is to design a device that can do optical coherence tomography imaging. Last time, I made an accessory for the lab’s OCT device, this time, I’ve been told to make an OCT device – this seems like a little bit of a jump, but apparently, it is possible to do this relatively cheaply and in a way that is understandable. The theory isn’t actually that bad, it’s just that the implementation is prohibitively expensive for most people.
I have found this article that seems to provide a way to do this without too much expense, though, so I got very lucky. Maybe I can make this work. My friend and I who are working on this together have access to an optical table in one of the biomedical sensing labs now, and to a budget potentially large enough to cover the costs of the components, so I’m hopeful.
I also think optics are pretty interesting. I have a barebones knowledge of how these kinds of things work, but seeing as my first internship in Rochester was with solar cells, my major is microelectronics, I’ve taken Modern Physics I (even if it was a couple of years ago), and my last project here was related, I feel like I have just barely enough background not to lose hope. And, if I’m successful, it could do some very nice things for my resume and my graduate school goals. So I’m appreciative.
Finally, my last recent goal has been getting an actual language certification by taking the TOCFL. This is both for my self confidence and for those all-important graduate school applications. This past week, the Chinese language center at our university held a mock-test session using the MoE’s 華測快篩 “Speedy Screening” feature – you can go online and get a quick, 25-minute assessment of your current level so that you know what to study.
This is for both listening and reading, and although the classroom was a little bit noisy (even during the listening section) because it wasn’t quite moderated like an actual test, I got scores that I’m happy with. I got a 508 (I’m not sure out of what) on the listening, which apparently translates to CEFR B1 level, and a 525 on the reading, which translates to the same CEFR level. B1 is good; my goal was to get a B2 with study. If I can get a B1 without study, I don’t feel too bad, but some preparation will be necessary.
I signed up for the TOCFL test session at the end of this month (on the last Sunday of June, in the early afternoon). I’m looking forward to it, but definitely haven’t really prepared that much yet. I’m just going to need to get some good sleep and maybe have a coffee or two and a lot of water (I do think that dehydration doesn’t get enough credit for the number of points it can take off of an exam score).
If I get CEFR B2 on that, I’ll be over the moon. We’ll see.
So, overall, other than embarrassing myself a little bit over the course of the beginning of this, from (for people that have read posts from a few months ago) getting our visas in the wrong city, to renting an expensive apartment with a water-leakage problem, I’ve been having a good time. And I feel pretty comfortable here.
Hopefully you can bear all of this talking about myself! Thank you for the free therapy, once again!