20 May 2023
Even the food court is too busy!
Before we get onto the food court experience, this evening I walked west, and soon found myself in the computer parts area again. This time I visited the new flash building, Syntrend. This is a great place, it is probably as close as you will get to a Bic Camera / Yodabashi in Taiwan. The building is 9 levels, plus a basement food court (absolutely packed at 5:30pm!). Much like the Japanese mega electronics places, there is also some clothing, a lot of anime type of stuff, kids toys etc.
They have all the communist party owned top brands as specialist shops, Huawei, Vivo, Xiaomi, all banned in Australia for spying on um, hmm, the Sydney opera house and Steve Irwin's crocodile world. They also have stores for Taiwanese brands like MSI, Gigabyte, Acer, Asus etc. and some sort of HTC Vive experience centre where you can put conjunctivitis filled headsets on your face and fight dinosaurs. If they had an MSI store in Australia I would get them to fix my overpriced MSI creator desktop that is supposed to be silent that sounds like a 747 but I digress.
After spending too long in Syntrend, I headed back to the main Taiwan train station, specifically the Q Square food court. They had staff stopping people from entering as it was too busy! Never seen that before. So I boarded a train back to my hotel and picked the least busiest Sogo food court, got my meal, then walked around with it for 20 minutes watching people trip over each other running to get whatever seat became available. Quite the experience!
Starting on the camera level in Syntrend. It is not possible to photograph the whole floor at once, it is a weird shape.
You can get out onto the roof though. No rain at the moment. Apparently it is raining ONLY at hiking time tomorrow, I will be annoyed.
Back into Syntrend, and I think this is an exhibition of some sorts on one of the anime levels. Anime hysteria is out of control, people need to devote their energy towards more creative pursuits! We have all seen underage cartoon girls in armoured underwear with giant round eyes fighting tentacles, you are not adding anything new to it!
This is part of the computer accessories floor, I would buy stuff from here if I lived here. It is nice to be able to actually see all the stuff in person. OK that's enough of Syntrend.
After fleeing the main station area and heading back to my hotel area, Sogo #1 was way too busy, so I went outside to see what was going on, and stumbled onto a craft market. Very much like the ones all over South Korea.
The craft market was actually very good, some decent buskers, and others waiting to take the stage in turn.
Here is the dinner I finally got to eat in the food court of Sogo #2, but only after walking around with my beloved tray for 20 minutes. I thought Taipei had too many department stores and food courts, tonight proves otherwise.
Then I walked a different way back to my hotel, through what I thought were back streets, but no, more street markets, another busy area.
An example of a Taipei street. I like the contrast in this shot.
And since every night is megamall night, here is a photo of the mall nearest my hotel, Breeze center (one of many across Taipei). It is a bit high end for me, what happened to Yves? Now it's just Saint Laurent. Now I just need it to not be raining when I wake up tomorrow so the final hike can be completed!