Taiwan has been a model of how to control the pandemic since its inception in early 2020, thanks to effective contact tracing, strict quarantine, and coordinated government action. However, these past few days have been unusual with the rapid increase in the number of domestic cases to a level that has never been reached since the pandemic started.
We are very grateful for the outstanding work that Taiwan has done to keep all its residents safe during this unprecedented global pandemic and we are also grateful that we as nomads can choose where we want to stay.
In this article, we won’t go over all the wonders of Taiwan that we already covered at length. Instead we will be digging into our expenses in Taiwan – during the pandemic for the past 9 months!
What is life like ‘stuck’ in Taiwan during the coronavirus pandemic?
For the month of June, we went on a month-long journey of fast travel to explore the island of Taiwan for a total of 31 days and manage to spend less than $1,800 in doing so!
During this escapade, we based ourselves in three locations: Hualien (9 days), Kaohsiung (14 days) and Taichung (7 days) and checked out a lot of places as we will share in this post. Some of our favorites included the amazing Taroko National Park, the gorgeous sunrise and tea plantations and sunrise in Alishan, the beautiful islands of Tianjin, and Liuqiu, the bike ride in Chihsang and much more!
What is life like ‘stuck’ in Taiwan during the coronavirus pandemic? Strange but wonderful! It feels strange because while most of the world was on pause in May, Taiwan has been moving forward and operating as usual. We dine at restaurants, get on crowded subway rides, explore tourist sites, see students going to school and workers going to work. We feel guilty at times for leading such free lives after we completed our home self-quarantine. If we were back in the US or France, we would still be unable to move around freely and would be constantly worried about possibly spreading the virus to our loved ones so we are very grateful for the freedom we have in Taiwan. So for that, thank you Taiwan!
What is life like ‘stuck’ in Taiwan during the coronavirus pandemic? Strange but wonderful! It feels strange because while most of the world was on pause in April, Taiwan has been moving forward and operating as usual. We dine at restaurants, get on crowded subway rides, explore tourist sites, see students going to school and workers going to work. We feel guilty at times for leading such free lives after we completed our home self-quarantine. If we were back in the US or France, we would be unable to move around freely and would be constantly worried about possibly spreading the virus to our loved ones so we are very grateful for the freedom we have in Taiwan. Thank you Taiwan!
In this post, we will take a look at our past month of expenses and share what our cost of living in Taipei has been during this pandemic so far. We will also check to see how we are doing towards our new yearly budget goal for 2020 that we recently decreased from $30K to $20K. Are you ready to escape the day to day and take an early look at the cost of living in Taipei, Taiwan?
We want to share how life in Taipei has been since we completed our quarantine by looking at how Taiwan is doing extremely well to stay on top of this pandemic and what lessons the rest of the world can learn from it.
No one saw this coming for 2020 and like many others, we had to throw our plans for the year out the window. Everyone is going through their unique challenges during this time. For us, as nomads, it’s dealing with the challenge of where to live and keeping our expenses low. Although it feels uneasy to not have a proper place to call home during this time, we do have flexibility working in our favor so we can explore a few options. We will review both our nomadic and financial plans and share how our nomadic lifestyle still gives us options even in such unprecedented times.
In this first post of our coronavirus series, we are discussing how we ended up in Taiwan and what it feels like to be in a mandatory home quarantine here in Taipei.
We happened to have upcoming plans to visit countries that are currently experiencing widespread transmission of the virus (including Italy and Japan) as well as plans to visit the US. We wanted to share how we plan to handle our travels for the rest of 2020, what part of our itinerary we might change, any recommendations we are following to stay healthy and how we see this outbreak in general.