Friday, February 06, 2009

A few must haves

Yes, a stamp of your name! Everybody has one here in Taiwan and it is one of the first thing that the secretary ask me to do when I got here. So here is my chinese name and seal.. it's "Wu Di An" ... which they took from "Dian W. U" haha. Fair enough.

The second thing that would be nice to have is of course bankcards! The green cute one is from the government bank. This is where my salary is deposited. The right card is a visa debit (number has been disguised.. ahahha) that I just applied for today.

Banks here have funny system. First of all, in the electronic age of today.. they still do paperwork and a lot of it! To apply for an account, I first have to go to the security guard at the door, tell him what I want. He will give me a slip of paper with the queue number. Wait for then number, then the banker. Most bank here have one person in each bank that speaks broken English. Consider yourself lucky if you meet that person! Then he will ask you for your passport, your Alien Residence Card, and your stamp, and normally a 1000NTD for first deposit. He then filled in about 20 different forms, log it in 3 different books, stamp it with 4 types of different stamps of dates, and at least 3 other validation stamps. Why not just computerize everything? And while this process is taking place you can see the two supervisors at the back doing next to nothing while the poor tellers working superfast with the million paperworks. Meanwhile you will be served a hot tea in plastic cup or offered some candies. Some consolation! If everything is settled, you will get your bank card and a bank book with the printout of your transaction.. and sometimes the banker have a tiny ruler to ruled out some entries. The card has magnetic stripe and the chip. It is run with different pin number. The whole applying for an account process took about an hour! It was an experience in itself, surely.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you should make Lee Di An instead
Since that's the real family tree name?

-= Di =- said...

Should have ya... hmm.. maybe will make a new one someday.. hehe