I am currently in Boston, but I was just hired via phone/email to work for Giraffe English School in Yunlin (Yuanlin?) as an English Teacher. I am personally more familiar with Taipei as I was there for about 4 months but I know nothing about the ‘middle’ of Taiwan or the southern bit. I understand that it’s about 4 hours out of Taipei and that it is more rural. Is anyone familiar with the Yunlin area and give me some tips on what it’s like there and what to expect?
Also, if anyone has worked for or is familiar with Giraffe English School, I’d love to know how your experience was, particularly since I am being hired from overseas.
Hope you’re open to paying for a cab or getting a scooter or bike of some sort. That region won’t have much in the way of public transportation. Less people will speak English there, too, and there will be no night clubs and maybe just a handful of other foreigners you’ll be lucky if you ever see outside your work.
Hope you’re open to the simple life! The advantage is apartments are ass-cheap, and food is too. If you’re single and male I’d recommend finding a cute local girl to keep you company. If you’re female, and you like Asian guys, do the same thing. Definitely make some friends from work and other nearby schools. If your Chinese is good, make some local friends.
Yuanlin is in Changhua en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuanlin
There’s literally nothing there. All the night life is in Taipei, and to a MUCH lesser extent Taichung and Kaohsiung. Pick up some hobbies and go traveling every weekend. Good luck!
Check out google maps and wikimapia to scope out your surroundings. Make some Taiwanese friends on www.myhappyplanet.com in advance. See if you can find some near you, and have them help you scope out apartments, hospitals, good restaurants, etc.
Which place are we talking about, Yuanlin or Yunlin? The former is a small city in Changhua County and the second is a county a little further south. I’ve lived in both counties - find out which it is and (provided I’m sober enough to type) I’ll write something about it tonight.
If it’s Yuanlin town, you’ll be ok. Plenty of other foreigners and a few bars. If it’s Yunlin county, it’s not so great, unless you like the quiet life.
It’s Yunlin County, thanks for pointing out that to me! I had no idea that there were two places, I thought I was just mispronouncing it. Uh oh, doesn’t sound too good then. XD They did say that they provide me with a car, and that it takes 30 minutes to drive to the nearest train station. Assuming I don’t kill myself or anyone else in a car accident, could having a car at my disposal make life there a bit less boring?
Oh, if the town is called Mailiao don’t take the job. It’s one of the most polluted places in Taiwan and there’s really nothing to hold anyone’s interest.
Isn’t the entire county the most polluted shithole in the whole country? It’s the kind of place you roll up your car windows and drive through as fast as possible in my experience. Horrible, horrible place.
But you’ll be fine as long as you don’t drink the water, breathe the air or eat the rice or vegetables. And pig farms actually smell OK once you get used to it.
It’s Yunlin County, thanks for pointing out that to me! I had no idea that there were two places, I thought I was just mispronouncing it. Uh oh, doesn’t sound too good then. XD They did say that they provide me with a car, and that it takes 30 minutes to drive to the nearest train station. Assuming I don’t kill myself or anyone else in a car accident, could having a car at my disposal make life there a bit less boring?[/quote]
You need to find out the name of the town. The odds are that the location is pretty bad (hence they haven’t mentioned it).
It’s Yunlin County, thanks for pointing out that to me! I had no idea that there were two places, I thought I was just mispronouncing it. Uh oh, doesn’t sound too good then. XD They did say that they provide me with a car, and that it takes 30 minutes to drive to the nearest train station. Assuming I don’t kill myself or anyone else in a car accident, could having a car at my disposal make life there a bit less boring?[/quote]
Hi,
I had the misfortune to live in a part of Yun-Lin called (Hu-Wei) for about 6 months. I hated it!
After my first very busy and sometimes stressful year in Taipei, a Taiwanese buddy told me that he was opening a school in the beautiful countryside… which had a university nearby as well as a small traditional town, he asked me to be the teacher/course designer and whatever-else a school needs. Never having been to the place I thought it sounded good enough, if anything I thought it would be a new experience…
When I got there I felt very dissapointed, the ‘beautiful countryside’ was infact a long chain of stinking industrial farms, with the occasional smattering of pylon, 7-11 and rice field. The traditional town was infact a shanty town put together with corragated iron, t’was filthy, no sidewalk, there was a small cinema but it smelled like cigarette and toilets. My main source of entertainment was a 7-11. There was a ‘technical - cough-cough’ uni for nearby, but the students weren’t really interested in improving their English. I really missed Taipei, the convenience, cinema, clubs, clean food, MRT, art galleries, proximity to Yang-Ming mountain, hot-springs and so much more!!!
Taiwan has many interesting places, yun-lin aint one of them, it’s the poorest county of Taiwan. Unless you want to punish yourself like the ever growing population of mormons the place seems to have ~ then avoid Yun-Lin and anywhere in it!
[quote=“Dr Jellyfish”][quote=“TiffAllen”]
The traditional town was infact a shanty town put together with corragated iron, t’was filthy, no sidewalk, there was a small cinema but it smelled like cigarette and toilets. [/quote][/quote]
I had the misfortune to live in a part of Yun-Lin called (Hu-Wei) for about 6 months. I hated it!
…
Taiwan has many interesting places, yun-lin aint one of them, it’s the poorest county of Taiwan. Unless you want to punish yourself like the ever growing population of mormons the place seems to have ~ then avoid Yun-Lin and anywhere in it![/quote]
Shoot. I got an email back saying it was Hu Wei. That bad huh…? I hate to give up on it but I don’t want to be miserable either. I mean, I don’t mind it being quiet and all but if it was so unpleasant for you I can’t disregard that…
Argh. Thank you so much for that little review. lol!
I had the misfortune to live in a part of Yun-Lin called (Hu-Wei) for about 6 months. I hated it!
…
Taiwan has many interesting places, yun-lin aint one of them, it’s the poorest county of Taiwan. Unless you want to punish yourself like the ever growing population of mormons the place seems to have ~ then avoid Yun-Lin and anywhere in it![/quote]
Shoot. I got an email back saying it was Hu Wei. That bad huh…? I hate to give up on it but I don’t want to be miserable either. I mean, I don’t mind it being quiet and all but if it was so unpleasant for you I can’t disregard that…
Argh. Thank you so much for that little review. lol![/quote]
Now you know it’s the one in Hu-Wei I can tell you more:
I met a South African girl there, who was absolutely distraught because on her first day of work, her manager said she didn’t look like the picture on her photograph and decided that he didn’t want her working there… after she’d came all the way to Taiwan!
There was a small group of foreigners living in Hu-Wei, teaching English, yet none of them I met had English as a first language…
I had hoped to learn a bit of Mandarin at the time - but they mostly speak Taiwanese.
If you are foreign you will be stared at and even pointed at on a daily basis, which hardly ever happens to me in Taipei!
I could really go on and on but I’ll just stop there.
A lot of the really awful places put a lot of effort into their on-line adds. Unless that’s what you fancy (some do), then I’d strongly recommend Taipei or one of the other cities like Tai-Zhong or Gao-Xiong. If you have a degree you should have no trouble getting a teaching job, if you have a TEFL/CELTA English qualification then you’ll be in an even better position.
If you ever come to Taiwan, you can always pay the place a visit… or perhaps you can get some images of it online?
You should think VERY carefully before taking this job. There’s a reason schools like this choose to recruit from overseas – simply put, they know they will find it difficult to find teachers already in Taiwan who would be prepared to live in Yunlin.
You should email a link to this thread to them.
Hu-wei isn’t that bad - there are worse places in Yunlin County. I know the place fairly well. I lived nearby for four years or so. Of course, I was drunk most of the time. Still, I managed to save a lot of money. Thanks to the internet you can live in the boonies nowadays and not feel too isolated. My saviour (well, apart from the booze and books) was ICRT and shortwave radio.
I had a couple of drinking buddies who lived in Huwei. It was their first stop in Taiwan. After a couple of years they moved to Taichung, but looked back to their time in Huwei with fondness. Small places like Huwei might be shitholes but they are the REAL Taiwan.
So I was talking with a Taiwanese girl that works with my boyfriend to see if she was familiar with it, and she said she grew up there. But first of all, she thought it was another place that she said to STAY AWAY from. I had shown her the Chinese characters after she had the wrong first impression and then she realized that it was a different place that was her hometown, and she said wasn’t really too bad. I’m kind of confused now and I’m gonna post the Chinese address… maybe you can tell me if it’s still the same place you are talking about?
Zip/Postal Code: 632
Location: Yunlin County 雲林縣
District: Huwei 虎尾鎮 <-----
Street Address: No6, Ln75, Gong-an Rd. 公安路75巷6號
I stay away from any place where ICRT brings hope.[/quote]
That sounds pretty terrifying to me: ‘Jeezo, the only thing that kept me sane in that place was the Hakka learning slot and Rick Monday playing Hotel California!’. Run, Forrest, run.
