Living Guide for a Taiwanese Town – Tainan City Case Study

Living in a Taiwanese town and wondering what’s to do? Let me help you out a bit.

It sounds like a somewhat naive question, but I get that alot, even in relatively bustling lively Taiwanese towns. I got that in Tainan atleast a dozen times this past year, mostly from students. As I know a thing or two about Tainan City, I’ll take that as a case study. Suppose you’re an expat in Tainan City, teaching English in Yong Kang, or perhaps studying in NCKU and you feel like there’s nothing for you to do in Tainan. Following are some suggested activities for you to think about.

Living as a foreigner in a Taiwanese City (Tainan City)

• Every Taiwanese town has thousands of places to sit down to eat or drink (for Tainan City – look up i-Tainan).
• There are some joints with live music with local bands (Tainan City – Bioplicity runs Jazz , Pioneer runs cover songs, Room 335 does Rock and Hip-Hop).

(video showing live music at Pioneer)

• Check out the local clubs (Tainan City – La Sight, The Orient etc.)
• There are usually lots of movie theaters around (Tainan City – 8-9 movies theaters and about 3-4 second-run movie theaters with 90NT$ for 2 movies).
• There should be some culture center with events (Tainan City – The culture center has evening music and visiting cultural events).

• There’s usually a bowling center (Tainan City – atleast one in Zhong-hua east Tainan).
• Taiwanese love KTVs. You’ll find them all over the place.

• In Taiwan, most chances are you’re not too far away from a beach (Tainan City has two beaches – An Ping, Golden)
• Most Taiwanese towns have night markets (Tainan City – the night markets travel all around the city and are usually packed with loclas).
• Taiwanese enjoy baseball so there’s usually a local stadium (Tainan City has the Lions).

• Find out where the locals hang out (Tainan City – evenings are usually An Ping harbor with kites flying around Matsu goddess).
• The bigger towns would probably have some sort of Chinese language and culture center for foreigners (Tainan City – NCKU has Chinese Language Center offering language and culture classes).
• There’s atleast one world-class shopping mall (Mitzukoshi), if you’re into (relatively expensive in Taiwan prices) shopping.
• Some of my friends used to like going to those video-games places (Tom’s World) or network computer gaming centers mostly open 24h.

Remember, Taiwan is really small, so wherever you are, you’re probably half an hour or so from another terrific town/city (Tainan City – Kaohsiung is ~40 minutes away, I’d include that in the what-can-I-do-if-I-live-in-Tainan list)

Enjoy your time in Taiwan and Tainan City.