Welcome to Daxi

When my friends see the title of this post, they may think I’m going to be writing about the weather, since “welcome to Daxi” is what I always say when I send them a video of the heavy rain we experience here seemingly every day. I don’t know how much it actually rains, but when I check the 10-day forecast and see 2-3 days of no rain, I consider it a miracle. Anyway, this post isn’t about the weather, and most of the photos I’m going to share here were taken on fair weather days.

I’ve been living in Daxi for almost three years and have never lived anywhere else in Taiwan, though I have traveled around the main island and been to every county except Nantou and the small islands so far. I have also stayed for months at a time in Taipei and Tainan while traveling. Although I like to complain about the weather and how it’s a bit hard to make friends living in the countryside, I haven’t found anywhere else that I’d prefer to live so far. I don’t particularly enjoy the feeling of living in a city area because that kind of life feels so disconnected from nature and the outdoors. Besides that, cities are too crowded and noisy, and the lifestyle feels more rushed than in the countryside.

Daxi is a partially mountainous, rural district in Taoyuan City, which is about 40km away from Taipei. I would not say it’s a convenient place to live, particularly if you don’t have a scooter or car because the public transport around here is not very widespread except around the city-center and a few tourist spots. However, its overall location in relation to other cities is great. There are trade-offs to living anywhere; if you live in a big city you sacrifice peace and quiet for convenience and more activities, if you live in the countryside you’re close to nature and can relax more easily, but have fewer conveniences. The biggest benefit of living in Daxi is that although it feels quite rural, it takes less than 20 minutes for me to get to a mall/movie theater, there are convenience and grocery stores next to my house, there are three train stations within 20-30 minutes from me, there is a Taipei MRT station about 35 minutes away, there is a major highway that comes through Daxi, and there are several buses I can take from next to my house directly to all of the neighboring cities (Longtan, Bade, Zhongli, Taoyuan, Yingge, Tucheng, HSR station, airport, etc.). So basically although it’s inconvenient to try to travel around within Daxi using public transport, the district is very strategically located for being able to easily get to many more convenient areas.

One of the biggest benefits to living in Daxi is the environment and closeness to nature. If people in Taoyuan want to go hiking, there’s a good chance they will end up coming to one of the many hiking trails in Daxi. There are also plenty of bike paths and riverside areas for cycling and running. On weekdays Daxi has very little traffic so it’s easy to go out cycling anywhere you’d like. People in city center may need to resort to going into a gym and riding on a cycling machine or running on a treadmill for their cardio because it’s inconvenient to try to get a cardio workout in a crowded city. It seems a bit boring to me to run, cycle, or walk around without having nice scenery to look at while you’re doing it.

When I leave Daxi to travel somewhere else, I sometimes feel a little bit tense knowing I’m about to go to a crowded and noisy area with bad traffic. When I get back to the quiet, familiar countryside where I live I’m washed over by a deep sense of relief and peace. On weekends Daxi can get crowded with people from other areas because most of the places worth going for tourism in Taoyuan are all in Daxi. Luckily most of these crowds stay around the city center and old street, so I can just choose not to go there if I don’t feel like it. Daxi Old Street on weekends is also a great place for street photography, so that’s quite convenient.

When deciding where to live in Taiwan, my only specific criteria was that I don’t want to live in Taipei. Although living in Taipei would be convenient since it has an MRT and many foreigners, and many people can speak English, I felt that it would not be in alignment with my goals and reasons for moving abroad. Although sometimes I do wish I had more foreigner friends just because maybe they can more easily understand the way I see things, I feel that it would be a shame to live abroad and primarily associate with foreigners instead of the local people. The primary goals I had after moving abroad were to improve my foreign language abilities, interact with local people, and have a ‘unique’ or interesting experience.

When I traveled in Taipei before I often found that as soon as I entered a store, the person working there would start speaking to me in English, making me feel a bit awkward if I try to switch to speaking Chinese afterward, and I also found that most young people in Taipei can at least speak basic English, and many of them are eager to practice – this would not be a helpful environment for improving my Chinese because it would enable me to be lazy and speak English. I also feel that Taipei does not have as much ‘local flavor’ as other parts of Taiwan due to it being a big, highly developed capital city with many foreigners. How unique can my experience be if I live in the city with the most foreigners, and the only city that most tourists visit when they come to Taiwan? For these reasons I felt that living in Taipei would not be a good choice for me.

Daxi, in contrast, has almost no one who can speak English, or if they can, they never make it known to me. Excluding my coworkers, I can probably count on one hand the number of local people I have spoken English with in Daxi. There are also very few foreigners here – I think in the three years that I’ve been here, I have seen fewer than 10 foreigners (excluding people who are obviously tourists on weekends) and most of them were Southeast Asian people. In some way, I enjoy seeing the shock on people’s faces when they find out I’ve been living in Daxi all this time because it makes me feel like I’m doing something unusual and interesting.

I will admit, when I first moved to Daxi I didn’t particularly like it. I felt lonely and couldn’t meet new people, and also I found it really annoying to have to take the bus to go to other places before I got a scooter. I got my scooter after around 8 months living here, so those first 8 months were pretty rough – that was also during the strict covid restriction time and my main ‘culture shock’ phase. After getting a scooter my situation greatly improved and I was able to go out and do stuff much easier, and became much more active in general.

When I first got here and was searching for an apartment, I was debating whether I should live somewhere else, like Zhongli or Taoyuan, and commute to Daxi each day for work, or whether I should just live next to my school and have basically no commute. At that time my thought process was that living near the school would save me a lot of time, and I could then use that extra time to just commute to the other areas to do fun stuff if I wanted. What I neglected to consider, however, was that after work I may be tired and not feel like doing any more unnecessary tiring things like traveling to a different city and later coming back to Daxi, whereas I’d have no choice if I already lived in a different area. The trade-off, of course, is that I would be living in a city. For now I will be staying here, but it may be helpful to think of ways to motivate me to go visit different areas to see my friends more often.

While life here isn’t without its problems, at present, I can’t imagine any other place I would want to live, and I feel that Daxi is the best district in Taoyuan. If you’re in Taiwan I would definitely recommend visiting Daxi if you have the time. Feel free to check out the photos below that were all taken in Daxi.