The picture above is of my international driver's license. It's a license that AAA provides that is valid for one year. I highly suggest getting one before you take any extended trip. The reason I have one however, is a long story in international relations and governmental policies.
Taiwan lives is this no man's land, brought about by China. China basically tells other countries (and specifically the USA) that if they have relations with Taiwan or any business with Taiwan, than they can't do business or have relations with China. In some ways these "rules" are dumb as it's quite clear that the USA does business with Taiwan, i.e. selling old weapons to Taiwan. But there are also ways in which these rules are very strongly adhered to.
The most notable is probably the fact that there is no American embassy in Taiwan. There is a place called the "American Institute in Taiwan" which does everything an embassy does, but i guess if they don't call it an embassy, than there is no problem. To be honest this lack of formal or out in the open official relations hurts Taiwan's economy greatly, and doesn't really affect foreigners here too much, but allow me to sound like a spoiled brat and talk about the driver's license issue.
Since the official USA government is not allowed to have an official relationship with Taiwan, individual states are. I don't really know much about how this works, and what this sort of relationship entails, I only know that it affects americans who want to drive here. Basically each state has it's own agreement with Taiwan and based on that, determines if you can drive in Taiwan. For example if your american driver's license is from some states, than you can just get a taiwanese driver's license no problem. No test needed or anything. Currently for the state my license is from, I can't do this. However I can use an international license.
You may have noticed I said "currently" this is because every year after chinese new year, the rules change. I have one friend who his state was allowed to use an international license, so he sent away for one from AAA, then when he got it and went to get it stamped here in Taiwan, they told him he couldn't. This is because it had changed the chinese year (in mid february) and the agreement with his state had changed.
Yes the way things are constantly in flux is a bit of a pain but it's all part of living abroad. You may be wondering why I didn't bother just taking the test to get a Taiwanese driver's license. Funny you should ask. I actually took the test a few years back, they are kind enough to have an english version of the written test. The problem is that the English version has some mistakes in it, so I didn't pass the test.
After the test they tell you which ones you got wrong, and the problem was the questions on the English test were wrong. For example it will be a picture of a stop sign and it asks you "what does this sign mean?" and answer A. Stop, B. merge with traffic, C. no u-turn allowed. So they computer said the answer was C, but of course it's A. I showed this to the people working there, and they agreed that the ones i had gotten wrong, I had actually gotten right. However in Taiwan this doesn't matter, they didn't have the ability to change my score even though they all knew and acknowledged that i should have gotten a perfect score. I've mentioned before that in Taiwan employees and even higher level executives are only allowed to do what the rules or their boss tells them, even if they know it to be wrong.
But it's ok, that way of thinking and educating will change one day. Until then I will continue to just send away for a new international license each year. That is until the year that my state no longer has an agreement with Taiwan.
