Taiwan is a beautiful country and an underrated travel destination.
Taiwan has a special place in our hearts. It’s the first country that Luke and I ever travelled to together, and more than that, we lived and taught there for a year. We learned a lot from living in Taiwan and our experiences there have shaped how we are and how we travel today. From the mountains of Jiufen to the beaches of Kenting, if you’re travelling in Taiwan there are loads of amazing places to explore.
Taiwan’s cinema captured my heart. Taiwanese cinema is a highlight reel of culture and landscapes with cinematic cityscapes of spiralling alleyways and plotlines, to serene countryside scenes. In this article, I share the best movies about Taiwan. I highly recommend watching some before travelling to Taiwan.
I used to be a fair weather hiker. I only wanted to hike when I knew it wouldn’t rain or get too cold, when I knew I wouldn’t get too muddy, when I knew I’d be able to get a good view from where I was headed.
All that changed when I started travelling. I realised that if you wait for the perfect hiking conditions, you’ll never go hiking at all. When you’re travelling, you only have a limited time in each place and you have to make that time count.
Teaching in Taiwan is something I often get asked about by people who are thinking about making the move and starting a new career on the island. What I always emphasise is that everyone’s experience of teaching in Taiwan is different – variables such as school and branch, workload, location, personality and whether you’re going solo or as a couple can be make or break. I’m interviewing different teachers in Taiwan to find out their thoughts on island life, ESL teaching and travelling. This interview is part of the Teaching in Taiwan series.
Reader Question: How difficult it is to learn Mandarin and is it isolating to move to Taiwan if you don’t speak it? The language barrier is my biggest fear, especially because I plan to travel in there by myself.
Is Mandarin really hard to learn?
Teaching in Taiwan is something I often get asked about by people who are thinking about making the move and starting a new career on the island. What I always emphasise is that everyone’s experience of teaching in Taiwan is different – variables such as school and branch, workload, location, personality and whether you’re going solo or as a couple can be make or break. I’m interviewing different teachers in Taiwan to find out their thoughts on island life, ESL teaching and travelling. This interview is part of the Teaching in Taiwan series.
Teaching in Taiwan is something I often get asked about by people who are thinking about making the move and starting a new career on the island. What I always emphasise is that everyone’s experience of teaching in Taiwan is different – variables such as school and branch, workload, location, personality and whether you’re going solo or as a couple can be make or break. I’m interviewing different teachers in Taiwan to find out their thoughts on island life, ESL teaching and travelling. This interview is part of the Teaching in Taiwan series.
Teaching in Taiwan is something I often get asked about by people who are thinking about making the move and starting a new career on the island. What I always emphasise is that everyone’s experience of teaching in Taiwan is different – variables such as school and branch, workload, location, personality and whether you’re going solo or as a couple can be make or break. I’m interviewing different teachers in Taiwan to find out their thoughts on island life, ESL teaching and travelling. This interview is part of the Teaching in Taiwan series.
Teaching in Taiwan is something I often get asked about by people who are thinking about making the move and starting a new career on the island. What I always emphasise is that everyone’s experience of teaching in Taiwan is different – variables such as school and branch, workload, location, personality and whether you’re going solo or as a couple can be make or break. I’m interviewing different teachers in Taiwan to find out their thoughts on island life, ESL teaching and travelling. This interview is part of the Teaching in Taiwan series.
Teaching in Taiwan is something I often get asked about by people who are thinking about making the move and starting a new career on the island. What I always emphasise is that everyone’s experience of teaching in Taiwan is different – variables such as school and branch, workload, location, personality and whether you’re going solo or as a couple can be make or break. I’m interviewing different teachers in Taiwan to find out their thoughts on island life, ESL teaching and travelling. This interview is part of the Teaching in Taiwan series.
After months of searching for ESL teaching jobs which would accommodate a couple in the same school, or at the very least in the same town, back in 2012, we finally had an offer from one of Taiwan’s largest language schools. We pretty much immediately accepted and only weeks later were in Taipei ready for a crash course of teacher training. Even when we were on the training course, we had absolutely no idea what part of Taiwan we would be living in.
Like many ESL teachers in Taiwan, we accepted a conditional contract offer over the internet. As part of this arrangement, the contract is only signed if you pass your teacher training course in Taipei. You can specify beforehand three location preferences but there’s no guarantee that you’ll be located there and you won’t find out until the last day of training. Luke and I were so desperate to be located together that we decided to make an open application, not specifying any desired locations.
This could have totally backfired on us. Fortunately, it didn’t.
No, is the short answer. You don’t need any teaching qualifications whatsoever to teach English in Taiwan. With teaching gigs offering full time employment in an interesting profession and excellent pay compared to the price of living, it’s little wonder many English speakers are considering leaving their home country.
One year ago, I quit ESL teaching in Taiwan. Now I’m on an indefinite travel adventure in Central America.
When I left Taiwan, I knew that I wanted to travel more but I still didn’t know how I was going to achieve that. Instead of sitting down and crafting out a long-term plan in time for our return to unemployment, Luke and I booked a flight to Vietnam and blew some of our hard earned savings. After all, we’d saved them for travelling.
By this time, I’d started keeping track of our expenses. Vietnam is a cheap place to travel, but when I looked at our Vietnam travel budget, I realised that the £6000 (that’s $9600) we’d each saved from teaching in Taiwan wasn’t going to go that far. We had to rethink the way we travelled.
We’re Charlie and Luke — UK travel bloggers, adventurers and storytellers. We travel slow and write about sustainable travel. We want to make responsible travel choices and help you do the same. Get to know us.
