Reality Check from Taipei

A lot of people asked if we have an apartment in Taipei yet. We don’t! Renting an apartment in Taipei is like anywhere else. Unless you’re willing to start paying rent before moving in, you’ll want to physically be there to check out the area and apartment before signing a lease. So, we rented an Airbnb for the first two weeks of August for apartment hunting. We do have an idea of the district we want to live in (Da’an).

In the middle of our vacation in Madrid, we got our first reality check. Our real estate agent in Taipei asked if she can look for apartments in both Da’an and Xinyi districts. I told her we wanted to concentrate in Da’an because we plan to use our Airbnb address (also in Da’an) to register for a nearby school. Then once we find our own apartment, we will update our address with the school. This is what some expats have done in the past, according to forums I lurk in.

But Kathy, our real estate agent, asked: “Did you ask your Airbnb host if you can use her address to register for school?”

Oh. Whoops.

It turns out our Airbnb host couldn’t let us use her address for school registration. We’re not sure why – maybe that address is already registered with a school – but we had to come up with Plan B, whatever that is.

We struggled with deciding what comes first – do we look for an apartment and then find a school nearby? Or find a school first, and then an apartment? I posed this dilemma on an expat forum and people advised to look for a school first because by the time we arrive in Taipei in August, many of the schools may be full.

Thankfully, a helpful stranger on the forum sent me a PDF of all the schools that were full in Taipei. I did some cursory research on schools that still have space (just based on Google reviews, the school’s website and Facebook page), and narrowed the list down to three. They are all in Da’an or Xinyi districts.

So now, our apartment hunting strategy is to find an apartment within walking distance to any of those schools, which is easier said than done. Apartments apparently get rented out quickly in Taipei so we’ll have to act fast. We have about one month to find an apartment and register for school before school starts on 9/1. We signed up for an adventure and we sure got it!