Pardon my French.
According to the post office they have a “poste restante” mail service. They hold mail for two months. Has anyone actually used it?
Yes. Just show them your passport and they’ll give you your mail.
Yes.
It works everywhere in the world. Taipei included.
[quote=“Alien”]Yes.
It works everywhere in the world. Taipei included.[/quote]
Which is unusual.
Is poste restante service available for large parcels? How should one address a parcel to be sent to the Taipei GPO?
Gosh, there’s a blast from the past! The memories that “poste restante” conjures up from my backpacking days of nearly two decades ago! I’d quite forgotten about the existence of what used to be so enormously important to me (especially in those ancient times long before we had e-mail).
However, my experience of poste restante in the martial law days when I first arrived here (December 1985) was not so good. I’d never had any problem picking up whatever was sent to me in countries all over Asia and beyond, until I arrived in Taiwan. But during my first couple of months here, before I’d acquired a residential address, a very high proportion of letters and packages sent to me c/o poste restante Taipei never reached me, especially those that were sent here prior to my arrival. In those days, the security authorities routinely opened incoming mail, and I suppose they just tossed away anything that they didn’t like or had the slightest doubts about.
But I’m sure things are enormously different now and the poste restante service in Taiwan is just as good as it is anywhere else.
I used the poste restante service at the Taipei GPO when I first arrived in Taipei in 1999. I received a number of letters and it seemed to work fine. There is a special counter for poste restante at the Taipei GPO. I don’t now how it works at smaller post offices.