Opening a bank account

I have been here for almost two weeks now, and I have still a lot of things to do in order to settle down. I don't want to rush and do mistakes so I'm taking my time. This week I decided it was about time to open a local bank account.


In order to do so, with a student visa and no ARC (Alien Resident Certificate) I first needed to request a taiwanese ID number at the immigration office. With the hours spent in the immigration office in Seoul packed with foreigners and unfriendly Korean immigration officers, I had myself ready to study in there while waiting for my turn... but the immigration office was almost empty and the workers were very friendly! I should have known... this is Taiwan.^^
So for the taiwanese ID you just need to fill in the form requesting your name, address, passport and visa number, etc... a copy of your passport you can do for 2 kuai in there and few minutes of your time. That's all!

Then comes the tricky part: selecting a bank. Near my place I could find HSBC, Citibank, CTBC bank and another Taiwanese bank I can't recall the name. So I went in and asked for informations about how to open a bank account in English.
For HSBC you need the ARC, the taiwanese ID number is not enough for them.
In Citibank, the two girls I came to speak to were very friendly but told me as that place was too "small" I had to go to another agency to open an account and they asked for my phone number so that someone will call me to give me all the info about opening a bank account... they never called me.
The other two banks... weren't really foreigners friendly as they were struggling speaking in English. Even though in the last one they all seemed really nice and I almost decided to give it a try there, I finally decided to go to the post office to open my account.
On Chunghwa post office website, you can find all the info you need in English and that's reassuring.

For the following steps I'm quite proud of myself. x) I saw on the post office website that you need to have a seal (chop) when you open your account in order to be able to withdraw money from any post office in Taiwan. If you just want to go with your signature, you will only be able to get money from the post office where you opened your account!
I found that quite surprising, and decided to go ask myself in a post office about it. And just for the challenge, I decided at the last moment to try to ask in Chinese! Ahah~ And you know what? I could get all the info I wanted without using a single word in English. I just couldn't believe it as I still think my Chinese is really poor. So yes, what I found on the internet was right, and it is okay to make a seal using my English name as I don't have an official Chinese one.

Shops where you can get a seal also make keys. If you don't know the Chinese characters for seal (印章 yinzhang), if you are not confident with being able to find these characters 刻印 (keyin) in the street, you can just look for a big key sign and you won't be wrong.
It cost me less than 3 euros for my seal. The lady there told me as there were a lot of characters it should have cost more but since I was a NTNU student it would only be 100 kuai for me. You must probably already know that Chinese names are mostly made from 3 characters... so yeah my name is a bit longer than that. =P
After "designing" my name chop on computer, adjusting the thickness of the letters and spaces between, it took 8 minutes for the machine to make it. Check the video on my facebook page!

The final step was then to go back to a post office, I went to another one close to my place, and tried my best in Chinese to make myself understand that I wanted to open an account and get an ATM card. Well... it worked so far! XD I brought my passport, the original copy of my taiwanese ID number certificate and my seal and just gave everything to the banker and he did the rest without asking much questions. He even helped me filling in all the information in the form as I couldn't understand. I just had to sign and give the money I wanted to put on my account. I didn't have much money with me so I opened my account with the minimum 10 kuai required! Ahah I have 30 cents of euros on my account~ wealthy girl ;)

Banking hours: from 8:00am to 5:30 pm

Did you forget your glasses at home? Don't worry you can use these ones xD

I will go back there after 5 days to get my ATM card and ask about how to transfer money to this account as they didn't give me any SWIFT code... but that's a good thing done already!

This experience gave me confidence in my Chinese abilities. I need to keep trying, and if I can't make myself clear I always can switch to English!

Everyone, believe in yourselves: if you don't try you can't know if you can do it or not and move on. I'll try too keep on like this too~

Thank you for reading my blog!

Floppy