To Taiwan and Back Again...: Din Tai Fung (鼎泰豐), Taichung City (台中市) and the end to our transience

On one of our nights off from training, Amanda and I met up with our friend Wai Shun and his family who were visiting Taiwan. Their trip just happened to coincide with our being in Taipei and it was great to meet up with them again so soon after our visit to Singapore. We went for dinner at Din Tai Fung (鼎泰豐), a famous xiǎo lóng bāo & dumplings restaurant that started in Taipei but can now be found in Taiwan, Japan, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Korea, the US, Malaysia, Australia and Thailand... my they have done well!!! The food and particularly the company were great and as xiǎo lóng bāo and dumplings are amongst my favorite foods, I was happy as a clam.

Skipping ahead to the end of our training, on Thursday morning we left our hotel in Taipei and climbed aboard a bus that had been chartered by our school to drop off new teachers in Hsinchu, Fongyuan & Taichung City. So far we have mostly traveled around Taiwan via the HSR (High Speed Rail) and so it was nice to take in some different scenery as our bus took us on a bit of a tour through the northern cities.

Upon our arrival in Taichung (台中), we dropped off our belongings at a hotel and a group of us were taken straight to lunch with senior staff from our respective branches. Lunch was several shared Taiwanese dishes that were delicious - no surprise there!

After lunch, Amanda and I were taken by some Taiwanese colleagues to look at apartments.

The first apartment was tiny, but with very high quality finishings. The building also had a spa, steam room, sauna, outdoor swimming pool, gym, yoga studio, business center and restaurant. The extras were extremely tempting but the rent was about 40% more than we had hoped to be paying and the apartment itself was just a bit too small.
The second apartment was on the second floor of an older terraced building. The apartment was enormous and had three bedrooms, but was very old and poorly laid out.
A little discouraged after the first two apartments, the last one that we saw was... just right! It was on the 18th floor of a relatively new building. Two bedrooms (one for guests), living room, kitchen, breakfast area, small balcony with laundry machine and one and a half bathrooms, one of which has a very fancy Japanese style toilet.

The owner was at home when we viewed the apartment and there was some negotiation regarding the rent. The colleagues that were helping us look at apartments had a lot of experience in such situations and they did a terrific job reducing the rent by 20% from the starting point. We really appreciate their help and there was no possibility that we could have managed the experience without their guidance and translations! Thank you A&S!!!

Later that day we were taken to our respective branches where we will be teaching. We were introduced to our colleagues, given a bit of an orientation, and I also had the chance to observe my new boss teach a class that is similar to what I will be teaching come Monday.

On Friday, we were at our branches from about 1pm to 9:30pm busy with branch specific orientation and more class observations. It was great to see the students and teachers in action and while we are both quite nervous about starting teaching on Monday we are also very excited.

Saturday has been move in day. Our Taiwanese colleagues again spent the morning helping Amanda and I by bringing us along with all our gear to the apartment and going over the tenancy agreement with us and the landlord (who had not yet moved out). A&S spent a good two hours discussing and negotiating the finer points of our tenancy agreement, making sure that we are adequately protected. Once everything was signed and money had changed hands, we went to a local Carrefour to do a little shopping (linen and the likes) while our landlord (along with her two children) finished cleaning and packing and left.

Tonight is our first night in our new place. In the past three and a half months Amanda and I have lived between crashing at a friend’s condo to hotel rooms to hostel rooms back to hotels to a short term apartment lease to B&Bs to hotels and more hotels and now have finally reached a place that we will be able to call home for the next year.

To commemorate all the moving coming to an end, the pictures attached to this blog post are an abridged montage of some of the various places we have spent the last three and a half months living...