My husband may be offered a job in Taipei. We have lived in Hong Kong for 2 years and would hope to complete our third before moving next summer. I know very little about Taiwan/Taipei so would love to hear your opinions about it. For instance what are the international schools like? Is it as polluted as Hong Kong? Is the medical care good? Is there a diversity of things to do?
It is just much harder to fit in than HK as there are a lot less foreigners. There is plenty to do and if you try hard you will have a ball here. It is cheaper and less polluted, the weather is about the same and the people are a lot more friendly.
It’s only like an hour away and you can get a flight for thruppence. Bob over and we’ll show you around.
Thanks for the offer! Any place is what you make of it but from what I’ve read so far taipei should be an interesting place to live. We won’t know for a while yet but in the meantime any more info is much appreciated.
First up, you are going to have to get your head around the local language. In HK you can get away with not speaking Chinese, but it is 1,000 times harder to do that in Taiwan. Taxi drivers almost never speak English, for example.
There are international schools, the European School for example, which does have a British School. I guess they’re good. Likewise health care, but you will have to take an active interest in this.
On another level, traffic is far crazier and far more third world than HK.
I’d suggest a weekend or more to check it out.
HG
Was this a typo? Otherwise what can you possibly mean? Surely it’s obvious that Taipei is far more polluted than Hong Kong in every possible respect!
No it isn’t, HK is filthy.
HG
[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]No it isn’t, HK is filthy.
HG[/quote]
It is and it isn’t. HK gets tons of fine particle crap from the factories across the border. Taiwan has less and less of that. However, one might be exposed to more pollution in Taiwan depending on lifestyle. It seems to me that if you have to take a scooter in Taiwan, then you’ll probably take a lot more crap into your lungs than if you were living in HK. Ultimately, though, it seems to me that the air is getting cleaner in Taiwan, whereas it’s getting worse and worse in HK, and won’t get better for at least a decade.
Last time I wa in Hong Kong I was astonished by how filthy the air was, in comparison to Taipei.
Taipei air pollution is over 90% the result of vehicle exhaust. Therefore, if you are away from traffic, or out during the times of day there is little traffic, the pollution is minimal. As I have argued elsewhere based on statistics, and no one has proven me wrong, air pollution is just a bit worse than in major cities in the west now. There might be 10-20 days when it is very bad, but overall it is comparable.
The good thing about Taipei is how easy it is to get away from it to clean places. Yangminshan National Park is right on the northern border of the city, and Muzha in the south, will have a cable car system in place by next year which will allow you to get up into the hills from the end of the MRT station.
Tigerman to my defense with statistics! Thanks pal. 
Outside central Taipei, say in Xizhi, where I live, you can’t really walk around town. The traffic and fumes are oppressive, it’s incredibly noisy, and there are no usable sidewalks/pavements. Just obstruction after obstruction, eyesore after eyesore. Rivers and streams are absolutely filthy, there is loads of junk and mess and flytipping, and really the place is pretty foul.
Are there a lot of places like this in Hong Kong? Maybe up in the new territories, I don’t know there very well. Tsimshatshui is always seedy, but never filthy, right?
I don’t dispute the “particles per cc” stats of course, but I think if they say that Taipei is only about as polluted as London, they are not measuring the sort of pollution I’m interested in. I think Taipei is basically a dirty, messy place, and HK is basically a clean, tidy place. That would be my one sentence summary for the OP: do others agree?
The taiwanese police officers are a joke compared to the professional Hongkong cops…also the law is rediculous here too. You’d probably find alot of things are more professional in HK…Taiwan is such a young country, so so so young… 
I don’t think so. Reading the local papers (here in HK) the HK cops seems to be shooting more of their own than the bad guys.
HG
HK cops deal with on averag someting like 2.5 crimes per year which is why they always go around in big groups. Add to that statistic the fact that many of those crimes are traffic related and you will start to understand how little the HK police force actually does.
There is very little crime in HK outside of organised crime, but that is rife. It is like London in the 60’s with the bad guys policing eachother. The normal people remain relatively unaffected until guns come into play, although of course most have witnessed someone getting “chopped” by a couple of guys with machetes.
HK is also absolutley filthy. The things that people toss out of their windows are varied and fairly unbelievable. I believe you are confusing HK with Singapore which is delightfully clean because they pay 3rd world labourers to clean up after the locals.
[quote=“Radar”]
HK is also absolutley filthy. The things that people toss out of their windows are varied and fairly unbelievable.[/quote]
My father in law seems to get hit at least once a year by a falling sanitary napkin. A couple of months ago in one weekend, two people were sent to hospital for the same head injury: scissors, dropped from two different public housing estates miles apart, lodged in the skull. Never step out from under the podium. You will be in range.
Sanitary napkins!!!?? Erhm, used?
HG
Here’s a snap of one woman from that weekend spree. As you can see, these are not nail scissors sticking out of her head.
More on HK’s “hard rain” from the Economist.
[quote]Hard rain
Aug 3rd 2006 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition
When hope goes out of the window in Hong Kong, the furniture often follows
“NEW YORK rain” is the local term for water that drips, annoyingly, from air-conditioners onto passers-by. In Hong Kong unwary pedestrians face more dangerous precipitation. On July 22nd a 78-year-old woman was rushed to hospital after a pair of scissors, hurled from a multi-storey building, lodged in her skull. The same day, a 28-year-old man in another part of the city suffered cuts after another pair of scissors hit him on the head, while a boy survived a brush with an iron bar lobbed from yet another high-rise window.
Despite all the modern sanitation at their disposal, many Hong Kong citizens still seem to prefer chucking rubbish out of the nearest window. As any housing estate resident will confirm, as well as a regular rain of beer cans and cigarette butts, other objects—used packets of Viagra, dirty cat litter, glass bottles, mattresses and even refrigerators—also fly past the window. Much of this is plain bad manners. But some also blame rising inequality for the downpour, which appears to be getting worse. Much of the object-throwing takes place in the city’s public housing estates, where many of Hong Kong’s poorer people live cramped together in tiny apartments. Many of their shoddily constructed buildings are crumbling: among the most common objects falling out of windows last summer were the windows themselves. As a result, the government had to spend HK$68m ($9m) on emergency maintenance of its housing.
Though the economy’s recovery since the panic over the respiratory disease SARS in 2003 has lifted living standards, the fortunes of workers have lagged behind those of the middle classes. If people cannot heave their political masters out of office, they can at least heave a broken television out of the window. Given the mainland’s far greater economic and social disparities, the authorities in Beijing must be hoping that this is one trend that does not spread north.[/quote][/b]
[quote=“Edgar Allen”]HK cops deal with on averag someting like 2.5 crimes per year which is why they always go around in big groups. Add to that statistic the fact that many of those crimes are traffic related and you will start to understand how little the HK police force actually does.
There is very little crime in HK outside of organised crime, but that is rife. It is like London in the 60’s with the bad guys policing eachother. The normal people remain relatively unaffected until guns come into play, although of course most have witnessed someone getting “chopped” by a couple of guys with machetes.
HK is also absolutley filthy. The things that people toss out of their windows are varied and fairly unbelievable. I believe you are confusing HK with Singapore which is delightfully clean because they pay 3rd world labourers to clean up after the locals.[/quote]
So what you say is that taiwan policing is better??? I doubt that very much, all they seem to do is smoke fag after fag, gamble, they are very scruffy, and dont deal with problems as any professional should…
But this is Asia and the Police systems in various asian countries never seems to match the USA / CA / UK police standards…
[quote=“fu xiao”]So what you say is that taiwan policing is better??? I doubt that very much, all they seem to do is smoke fag after fag, gamble, they are very scruffy, and dont deal with problems as any professional should…
But this is Asia and the Police systems in various asian countries never seems to match the USA / CA / UK police standards…[/quote]
I think you are watching a little too much CSI, fu xiao. I’ve known far more “scruffy” chain smoking cops in the US. Let us not forget that corrupt cops and dirty sheriffs are no more rare in the West than they are here. I’m not sure where you live in Taiwan, but I’ve lived in both Kaohsiung and Taipei, and I have never seen a cops like the ones you describe. I am, of course, not suggesting that they don’t exist, but the cops here are certainly far more effective than you give them credit for. I recall in 2004 or 2005 there was a guy who went into 7-11’s and laced some energy drinks with poison. One man died and many were hospitalized and the company had to pull all of their product off the shelves. Within 2 weeks the man had been arrested and brought into custody and tearfully confessed. I shudder when I think how long a guy like this would have run loose in the States.
Well I guess I stand corrected… I haven’t lived in HK and I’ve certainly learnt a lot about the place from this thread! I find it difficult to imagine somewhere as dilapidated and polluted as Xizhi in HK: which districts or quarters do people have in mind?
Posters rushing to the defence of the Taiwan police. Never thought I’d see the day!
(btw why didn’t they take the scissors out of that woman’s head? Can only doctors remove items from skulls? I have no idea)