Cost of Living, Taiwan Vs. 'Murica!

So, recently I’ve been taking a look at some jobs back in the US. To determine the feasibility of an eventual return. While it looks I could probably make a living there, I’d be living off of much less. Let’s do some of the math here…

There was an ad for a public school teacher in Phoenix, AZ at $38,000 a year. Of course, numbers are deceiving seeing as how nearly 9,000 of that is going to go to federal and state tax and social security. 

By comparison, a foreign teacher in Taiwan can make about 28,000 a year, more or less, but only 1400 of that will go to tax. 

Adding it up, so far it’s $26,400 in Taiwan vs. $29,000 in the US

Now lets factor in health insurance. In the US, it's going to cost you about 1,200 a year if you're enrolled in the company plan...if not, could cost you $5,000. The Arizona gig is a public teacher job, so lets call it company sponsored. In Taiwan, national health insurance is free, besides negligible deductibles...let's call it $400

After that, we’re at $26,000 in Taiwan vs. $27,800 in the US…

Now look at rent:

In Phoenix, the average rent is about $800 per month. In Taipei, it's about $450. 

Taking rent out of the pile, now it’s only  $20,600 in Taiwan and $18,200 in US leftover for everything else.

Now public transit is up to the individual. But, it is true that there are many more jobs that you need a car for in the states than in Taiwan. Here, you can just ride a scooter, which you can buy for about a grand and which takes very little gas. Or, you could just take the very timely and convenient public transportation here, which is world class. I’ll take my car payments for example when I was living in the US. All told, I paid about $500 a month for financing, insurance and gas. To be fair, I did have to replace a bunch of things on the scooter. Amounted to about a grand US…hopefully the thing will be tip top for some time to come now though. Gas doesn’t cost anymore than like 10 dollars a month.

So…

In Taiwan with a scooter (including cost of purchase): 18,500 …In America with a Car: $12,200.


Of course, that’s not all! The cost of eating must be taken into account! Now, for eating out in the US, we're talking like between 7 and 30 dollars usually (if my memory serves). In Taiwan, it's usually between 3 and 15. I mean, you can get nice lunches here for 4-5 dollars and nice dinners for 9-12 dollars. In the states, anything marginally nice costs like at least $20.

So, I’m not going to do the math for that part, but I think you get the point! Taiwan is tough to beat for cost of living and expenses. America really needs to get its act together though and start giving average Americans a bigger slice of the pie. Good, I'm sure now that I've said something about it, our senators will have a good think and get right on it! Only in my dreams....

Ko Wen Jie Vs. Taipei Traffic ROUND 1!

So Taipei has gotten this new Mayo Ko Wen Je (柯文哲) This guy is the ultra coolness. The now Mayor of Taipei City, has had very little political ambition from his job as a doctor before. Politicians went after his team at his hospital, provoking his augur and ultimately leading to his bid for Taipei City Mayor's office. A bid which he won in a landslide election as an Independent.

This guy does not give a hoot for ceremony or any kind of bullshit. He cuts straight though the crap. He halted construction on the Taipei Arena after finding all kinds of problems and corruption with it. He just shut it down. Things in Taipei are getting better with this new nonsense mayor. He already made new rules to improve parking issues and the like. In this article, he proposes cameras to do the job. 

Academics criticize Ko parking camera plan

Several law experts from National Taiwan University (NTU) yesterday joined a district court judge who criticized Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je's (柯文哲) idea of using surveillance cameras to arrest individuals who...

CHINAPOST.COM.TW

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 Let me just give you a taste of the kind of crap I deal with on a daily basis with these fools on the Taipei roads. People stop their cars wherever and whenever they please. They don't care if it's at a red or yellow line. I have seen people park right around the corner or a busy intersection right turn lane, in the actual turn lane itself, or just straight up double park right in the middle of the street, effectively cutting off a whole line of traffic. Or, on a major arterial like Xinyi during rushhour, they will just park their little fucking luxury cars right on the side of the road because they can't be bothered to go find appropriate parking so they can run in and get whatever it is they want to get while the entire city suffers because of the reduced traffic flow on that major roadway. 
It doesn't even end there. People back up on the middle of the road like it's no big deal. They will swipe in front of you coming out of an alley and then just stop and "park" in the middle of the road, as this has now become somewhat acceptable.

So I say if he wants to cut that shit out...more power to him! I'm tired of these jackasses as much as the next guy. If we didn't have people who so flagrantly needed to break the laws, we wouldn't have a need for enforcement. Already, we see police ticketing people for coming too close to pedestrians in the crosswalk. So far since then, I have noticed significantly more respectful drivers in the crosswalk. 1984 my eye...Let's hear the alternative solution: 

"An increase in police manpower and the use of surveillance cameras are not solutions to the problem, the judge said.

He suggested Ko should investigate why illegal parking is so common and seek ways to increase parking spaces for motorists in Taipei."(Taoyuan District Court Judge Chien Chien-jung (錢建榮))
Bump that yo. These fools are mad out of control and this whole governmental laissez faire attitude is exactly the kind of policy that makes it OK for people to do as they please. Maybe we need to design better parking areas, or maybe, just maybe...people need to exercising a modicum of common sense and stop parking their shit where it is obviously dangerous to do so, like in the afore mentioned places. All it's going to take is for one guy to whip around a turn lane on a green light to be met by the back end of a car that's not supposed to be there in that lane and *!whack!* Honestly, the amount of times I avoid scooter wrecks per day not because of traffic laws, but in spite of them is simply amazing. You just always have to expect people to be doing shit here that is completely ridiculous. But what's nice, is apparently, others think it's ridiculous too. So more power to you, Ko-Wen-Je. Keep on doing what you're doing. 1984 my arse! It's more like Mad Max with people scooting around on bikes in a lawless post-apocalyptic landscape!

Sloppy has had Enough of China

This morning I stayed home sick from work. I took a half day yesterday and had a relatively peaceful late afternoon and evening in the apartment. This morning, I stepped into the shower in a pretty good mood. I had Dylan playing on my little bluetooth speaker and was feeling overall pretty good. Then I heard a really loud drilling noise that made the whole room vibrate so much that I thought it may be coming from my bathroom. 

7 Months ago, I would have popped off at that and went demanding that whoever was making the noise cease immediately. However, it would seem that over the months, I have grown accustomed to regular intrusions into my personal space and repeated crossings of my personal bottom lines. 

I began to entertain something absurd. What if the drill just came right out through the wall and did a little rotation in my face? Cut to the drill coming out of the wall and a man peaking his eye in the hole. No wait, this is China. He probably wouldn’t even notice he had just drilled through my shower and would have kept on drilling. Then I would have had to ask him three consecutive times to stop it please before he decided to understand me. 

“Only in China”, as the co-CEO of my current company likes to say. “There are things that happen only in America, but then there are things that happen only in China and no where else in the world.” China is in your face. There situations that can be overcome in a foreign country with the simple attitude of "do as the natives do". Trouble is, I don’t even think the natives like Beijing. 

To put it quite simply, there are just too many damn people. It is nearly impossible to find peace and quiet here. Not in your apartment, not at the park, not at work, not on the street. Beijing is just deafeningly loud and way too close. You can’t walk anywhere without getting cutoff. and I mean that quite literally. I can’t walk down the street for more than 5-10 minutes without getting cutoff. Every single day, on my way to work, cars swipe in front of me within a foot while I am in mid stride crossing the street with a green walk sign on the other side. Yesterday, I was crossing the street on green and a scooter nearly hit me. But they didn’t even slow down, they just said excuse me a bunch of times louder, with out making any speed adjustment other than just what they needed to not kill me. 

At work, I can’t even choose to breathe non-polluted air. Last week, we had 450 AQI, and the kitchen staff had the doors to the outside wide open. The entire building was completely contaminated and our air filtration capacity, although existant, is totally inadequate. Judy had to actually wear a mask IN her office because Chinese people apparently just do not give a fuck. 

I would say, on the days with the most serious air pollution, maybe 10% of the population wears a mask. Anything below hazardous, however, and they couldn’t care less. Judy said that a team of her coworkers was even playing basketball outside. When I go to the indoor gym, I have the same problem with people opening the windows on days above 200 AQI. I mean really, they could not care less. 

So how about getting away from it all? Maybe a nice vacation is in order. Well, last week, during National Day, Judy and I tried to take a taxi to a place where we could ride a boat down a mountain. We went up the freeway north. We began to see big trucks parked on the road to the right side. Other drivers who were turning around because of the apparently stopped traffic up ahead were driving on our side of the road in a makeshift lane coming at us. It went on like this for miles. Truck after truck…just sitting there. We still hadn’t gotten it quite figured out yet when the cab driver told us that these same people had been stuck in traffic when he came up this road, YESTERDAY. 

We turned around and tried another route with the same result. Then, we tried the mountain route. No luck. We just gave up and decided to head to a section of the great wall that was nearby.

Of course, the wall is packed with wall to wall people. When trying to climb up 45 degree angle sections of the wall, you still have to deal with the impoverished sense of navigating space that the Chinese have. They observe no safety rules, walk on whatever side they want, run up the stairs and down them and stop whenever and wherever they please. You just don’t get a break from it. 

The next day we tried a park called Fragrant Mountain. There was a long hike to the peak and every. single. step. of the way…there were people packing every square foot of the path. Sitting, standing at junctions, people selling cucumbers, water bottles, and popsicles. And endless stream of people. Every where, anywhere, all the time. Beijing. 

Cab drivers blocking bus stops, people cutting you off in line, waiting for security checks at subways. Walls surrounding every establishment, walls built in the middle of sidewalks. No reason and no rhyme. Beijing.

People singing in the subways the streets and the trains, waiters talking real loudly in restaurants. Polluting the air and your ears and the streams, the smog it is thick. Beijing. 

There is no common sense in Beijing, only nonsense. And it is time for Sloppy to GET OUT OF BEIJING! 

Judy and I have decided to move back to Taiwan in December…and not a moment to soon!

The drive to fragrant mountain. 

450 AQI

More pollution shots

The Summer Palace (Yi He Yuan)

Take a look at the beauty of the summer palace. This is a picture I took at around sunset from the bridge inside the southern gate.

 The royal summer place of Ming and Ching dynasty Emperor's was built in the 1700's, burned down and rebuilt once and is now a national park in Beijing. Like the Forbidden Palace, the summer palace is breathtaking in expanse. 

We live right next to this place and have still only seen maybe half of it. These pictures are from two separate visits I made. One was by myself briefly after work one day where I entered the south gate. The other is with Judy where we entered the east gate.

 Both visits were on beautiful weather days in Beijing. The day Judy and I went was bright and sunny and clear and clean, the city at its best. We first hiked around the inside perimeter and through some smaller buildings and gardens.

Then, we hiked through what seemed like miles of highly refined nature trails, lined with lanterns and stone benches. The trails meandered gradually uphill until we overlooked Kunming Lake.

This is the entrance to the Buddhist Tower of Incense, which is boasted as an architectural achievement of the day. 

This is the tower from the south side of Lake Kunming.

And from right outside. 

These are the buildings located behind the tower in the mountain. I think it was a sanctuary for monks.

And this is why the Buddhist Tower of Incense has such a name. The great bronze and gold gilded"Thousand Handed Buddha" (Chien Shou Guan Ying)

Then it was down and back up the stairs on the exterior facade to the next pavilion, the "Bronze Pavilion". You can see how far away the west side of the palace is if you look at that tower in the distance. 

 

The Bronze Pavilion. The doors were stolen when the place was burned to the ground and then later returned to China as a gift.

We then descended from the pavilion through narrow and ornately decorated hallways that looked like this: 

The roofs are fashioned the same as in the Forbidden City.

After hiking through that bit and pounding up and down steps for a few hours in the dry summer heat, we were ready to get inside. On our way out we saw some of the bronze items, including a very strange mythical creature peculiar to Chinese culture. 

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The obligatory lion to guard the entrance.

During my days at work, sometimes I go out for lunch. I always pass around the Summer Palace, around its outer moat, which is choked with mighty lotus flowers stretching towards the sun's blazing glory.

  
The day I visited alone, I crossed the bridge to a little island that can only be accessed from the south. Some nice parting shots.

Go ahead, you can look again.  You deserve it! I hoped you enjoyed the pictures and also that you enjoy the rest of your day or evening!

-Sloppy