My first days in Taiwan were horrible

I love Taiwan. I feel more at home here than I ever did in Europe, or in London, where I spent years before this. I'm Pieter Borremans, born in Indonesia, raised in Belgium, living in Taiwan since 2018. But if you'd asked me during my first week here, you'd have gotten a very different answer.

I had been to Taiwan before, but only as a tourist, and only in Taipei. That trip was over a decade earlier, in January, when the temperature sat around 11-16 degrees. Cold by Taiwanese standards. Nothing about it prepared me for what I walked into.

The first few days were the kind that make you want to leave, or sit in a corner and fucking cry.

The heat hit like a truck

I arrived in September. After years in London, my body was calibrated for European weather: rain, grey skies, turtlenecks, coats and hoodies heavier than a wall.

Taipei was 26 to 30 degrees. And I went straight from Taipei down to Tainan, which is farther south, meaning hotter.

I was melting faster than an ice cream. The heat here is not European heat. I've been to southern Spain, and that felt manageable. This didn't.

I wasn't dressed for it; most of what I'd packed was winter clothing, and every time I stepped out of an air-conditioned room, the sun and the humidity hit me like a truck.

Those first days were absolute freaking torture. My mood swung all over the place, and I had zero desire to explore Tainan in that heat, which is a bad way to start a life somewhere new.

Three dogs and a brand new shoe

After a sleepless night, a trip to immigration, and a day spent mostly indoors, the evening finally cooled off enough to go out. Snacks, street food, a basket of things from 7-Eleven to take home and taste.

Read also: Western Food Became My Comfort Food in Taiwan

Someone was always with me back then, and in Taiwan a scooter is simply how you move around. Completely normal.

I was on the back with no idea where we were while she showed me the small streets of Tainan. Her parents live outside the center, so it gets remote quickly.

She took a wrong turn into a narrow alley that ended in a yard. The yard had dogs.

They started barking and running straight at us. I told her to go. She said relax, it's fine. One of them got my ankle before she got the scooter moving.

My shoe was chewed, my ankle hurt, and for a few seconds I was convinced three dogs were about to take me apart in an alley in a country I'd been in for less than 48 hours. It did not make me feel welcome.

"Do you trust those cheap laborers?"

If you think that was the low point, it wasn't.

Bureaucracy is hard for any foreigner who's just landed, and opening a local bank account in Taiwan without an ARC narrows your options fast. My immigration paperwork was still hot off the press.

You need an ID number and a Chinese name, which gets assigned to you. That left me with Post Bank or Taishin.

The only reason Taishin worked was that her family had been clients there for something like forty years. Without that, it would have been a much longer fight.

She handled the paperwork with someone in a separate office, and the account was opened. Then we went to the counter.

The teller was old. Thousand-year-old ginseng old. I didn't think anything of it at the time.

I was standing next to her, because what else was I supposed to do? She asked to withdraw 50,000 NTD in cash from her own account, and the teller asked her:

"Are you sure you want to do this in front of him? Do you trust those cheap laborers?"

I had no idea what had been said. I just watched her face go from pale to green to red to a color I haven't seen since.

She went nuclear. She argued with him, and he didn't care. So she called her sister, who is a top client there with the company accounts and the factory. Her sister was through the door fifteen minutes later, and it went from nuclear to world war three.

When she finally explained it to me, the tally in my head read: tortured by the weather, chased and bitten by three dogs, and now called cheap labor by a stranger who had decided I didn't belong here.

I was born in Indonesia, and I look as Asian as it gets, even though Belgium raised me from the time I was a baby.

There's a large workforce in Taiwan from Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and the teller looked at my face and filed me under it. Then he warned the woman standing beside me not to trust me around her own money.

Stay of fly back?

It took me a while to process all of it. Any sane person would have bought a return ticket. And in my case, I can work from anywhere, so it doesn't matter where I am going.

I didn't, because when I sat with it, none of it added up to a verdict on the country. The teller was old school, probably tired, probably carrying a narrow view he'd had for decades before I ever walked in.

The dogs were a wrong turn down a dark road. The weather was just what September is at this latitude. Bad luck, stacked three deep in the same week.

If you've just landed and your first weeks are going badly, I'd tell you the same thing. Your body needs at least one full season before it stops fighting the heat, and there's no shortcut through that.

The bureaucracy is faster than Europe, but you will need someone local in your corner for parts of it, which isn't a failure on your part; it's just how the system is built. Or at least it will go much faster and smoother.

And at some point in your first year, someone will look at you and decide what you are before you open your mouth.

Every foreigner here gets some version of that, whether you're white, Southeast Asian, or like me, something people can't place.

None of it fully goes away. I've been here since 2018, and I still get the occasional look, the occasional assumption. What changes is that it stops being the whole story.

The heat becomes normal. You learn which alleys to avoid. You find the people who make the place feel like yours.

I still don't know if I'd call myself a local. I know I stopped being a tourist a long time ago. And I know the version of me sitting in an air-conditioned room in Tainan that September, with a chewed shoe and a sore ankle, would not have believed he'd still be here now.