mm there was a Cali kid that was coming back visa-exempt and his landing card looked silly but they let him by pretty easily… I think they were just like well you’re going to be here for 14 days, fuck it we’ll just stamp the visa and go? By the time you get to immigration they know you’ve gone through a bunch of other ish and if they wanted to hassle you I think they would at the 3rd CDC desk when they are confirming all of the quarantine information.
My biggest problem was the first desk guy kept arguing with me that my street address was not a street. Because when I told him the address in chinese I used “road” not “boulevard” so he insisted it didn’t exist (but I had written BLVD). It was a solid 3 minute debate until a good native speaker helped me out. I fucked that one up, but I was just like man I’ve been there for 7 months and all the cab drivers understand this address dont’ tell me it doesn’t exist.
If you chose line 1, you end up getting bumped back to line 3 almost regardless it seemed. Yet some people just rolled up in line 3. It was confusing AF.
After the CDC lines of chaos, and beyond the African Swine Fever checking station, there is a quarantine station that automatically monitors people’s temperatures with infrared cameras. So they did check temperatures; just not by hand.
Oh yes, this sign was up at the regular taxi stand lol. And they were just saying if you had the quarantine form you had to go alone. There wasn’t anything special about the taxis from what I saw…same line.
Play with fire, get burned.
The problem is they burn us too.
Lock em up for two weeks it’s good for everybody.
The reason for the imperfect response was that the rules had just changed plus the passenger number hadn’t dropped off completely. I doubt this will continue.
You have every right to present any grievances in written form to the Taiwan CDC, which si teh proper authority in thsi case, or call and complain.
However, you not only gave false information in your application but also did not follow protocol and jumped into any cab, an illegal cab to make it worse? The reason that you must take specific cabs is that they will register that you indeed got off at the address you wrote down. Otherwise, you will be considered a runaway. Both these offenses will get you fined.
What is special about these taxis is that they get disinfected after each trip.
Temperatures are checked by a friggin screening frame, a big machine you walk through like X rays, which is a bit nmore accurate and safer than someone with a flimsy gun at your forehead. They have these at trains stations, too.
There have been extensive coverage that the e-gate was cancelled for foreigners since February.
EDIT
rereading I notice this is all in Kaohsiung. Seems that Kaohsiung authorities are really not on the ball, it is not the first complaint I have read about them.
That does sound a bit odd/insecure/inefficient/error-prone. I guess they just haven’t yet had the time to code an actual online system and make sure that it doesn’t accept foreign passport numbers or names longer than 5 characters?
Seriously though, I’m a bit surprised they’re not better prepared by now (in contrast to the credit Taiwan has been getting in the media for handling this so far). I understand that the protocols are changing pretty quickly, but they’ve been requiring that travelers fill out the CDC forms for like 5-6 weeks (?) now, so it’s weird that the people at the top haven’t put together some plan/system for quickly dealing with incoming travelers and their information.
I think there simply weren’t very many travelers for a while so they didn’t need to figure out how to expedite the process for large crowds. Now people are suddenly coming back in waves larger than we were immediately equipped to handle.
The way my cousin (flight attendant) describes it, planes were flying around nearly empty for weeks and then suddenly, like within the last few days, they started coming back carrying plague vectors at full capacity.
