| By
Rupali Ghosh
As a non-native English speaker on a Spouse
Visa living in Taiwan, you’re going to have a lot
of time to kill. You won’t be able to find employment
that doesn’t involve rubber gloves and guts or toxic
chemicals (or any combination of the three). Your spouse
will be at work every day and you’ll be left at home
at the mercy of Chinese TV and the periodical garbage truck
serenades.
Fortunately, there are steps you can take
to alleviate the pains of this agonizing and unjust fate.
First things first:
Get central. Select an apartment as close
to the center of town as possible – assuming, of course,
that the center of town has a definitive shopping mall with
a good English-language bookshop and an even better supermarket.
These two are more important than you could have ever imagine.
Browsing is a great way to kill time. It doesn't make a
difference if you hate books because fake browsing works
just as well.
Don’ts:
Don’t Look for a Job:
Do not look at those teaching job ads
(or Taipei Times ads looking for copy editors). Even if
you’re a trained journalist fluent in English with
EFL teaching experience. Those jobs are exclusively for
native English speakers, North American accent preferred.
You non-native good for only computer tap-tap and eat curry,
no?
Don’t Turn on the TV:
CNN International will kill you. If it
doesn't, then you will kill yourself laughing at the shopping
channel selling Up-Your-Cup papaya gel that promises to
make every Taiwanese woman's Pamela Anderson fantasy come
true.
Don’t Take Up a Hobby:
Have none of that Little Women, Good Housekeeping
jewelry-making, water-coloring crap. Not just because you've
read your Germaine Greer, but because you’ll lose
your mind trying to buy your supplies. You’ll spend
hours at silly DIY stores with names like Momma Bear that
sell ugly beads, one kind of pliers, childish craft kits
with vomit-inducing designs, and God-awful store music that
leaves you with a splitting headache (and the ugly beads
that you bought anyway).
Do’s:
Eat:
The supermarket is a good place to get
hooked on to addictive food products. Buy them in bulk and
spend many pleasurable hours chewing on them -- then spend
many more hours planning diets to get rid of those extra
pounds. (IMPORTANT: save the diet for when you and your
spouse get posted to somewhere less exciting than Taiwan
-- like Bratislava). |
