Tag: living

My wife and I moved to Taipei with a certain amount of trepidation. The benefits were clear: she could take time off work to learn Chinese and all the materials that I would need to finish my dissertation were available. Yet it was a nerve-wracking prospect to spend nearly a year away from our dog, whom my father-in-law is looking after, in a place where only one of us spoke the language and neither of us had been. Now, ten months later, it was proven to be one of the best choices we could have made. We had heard Taiwan was an easy place to live, but had not realized it would be easier than anywhere we had lived before. Between the friendliness of the people, the ease of transportation, the cost of living, and the abundant access to work materials, it has been more pleasant than we could have imagined. Most of my time this year has been spent working on my dissertation. The wide-ranging and easily accessible materials at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica allowed me to go from just two chapters to a full dissertation. The desk they provided and my extremely