Day 3 in Taiwan: Geek’s Paradise

Slept in today. Take that, jet lag.

In the afternoon, we went to one of my favorite places in Taipei: the Guanghua Digital Plaza. It’s near the Zhongxiao Xinsheng station.

Guanghua Digital Plaza

Pretty much every time I come to Taiwan, I find time to visit at least once. The place is like a geek’s shopping mall with a bunch of small stores selling electronics, computer parts, video games, books, and things like that.

It used to also be a lot more ghetto, being this rundown, 2-story place under an overpass. But now, after moving to its brand-spankin’-new location, it’s this 6-story wonderland complete with built-in restaurants, convenience store, and escalators.

Built-in restaurants

Built-in convienence store

Guanghua has definitely taken advantage of the extra space with lots more stores, even official company booths on the first floor.

First floor

The second floors on up are where the interesting stores are: computer parts and video games. Monitors playing demos and random computer parts line each of the dozens of stores there.

Final Fantasy XIII just came out in Japan, so the FF13 trailer was playing a whole bunch. Was really tempted to buy the Japanese version of FF13 at one of the video game stores, but I’m hesitant since the Final Fantasy games always have a lot of text that I’m not too willing to read in Japanese.

On the other hand, I might go buy a copy of Project Diva on the PSP. I’ve had a lot of fun playing it and I’d like an actual copy of the game.

Inside Guanghua

Around the fourth floor, electronics parts shops start to pop up, selling things like batteries, lights, and stuff like that. The more interesting ones are the ones that sell the small parts like resistors, solder, cables and stuff. The store below had shelves and shelves of small parts for sale. Almost makes me wish I was working on a project so I could buy up the parts I needed instead of ordering from DigiKey or something.

They also have a bunch of Hi-Fi stores with amps and speakers. They even stores that sell high-end hi-fi parts like WBT connectors and nice Nichicon caps.

Electronics parts shop

On the top floor, they have a bunch of repair shops. Since I’m more of a DIY repair kinda guy, not too interesting to me.

Repair shops

The funny thing about Taiwan though, is that although they make the stuff there, computer parts are actually more expensive over there than in the States. For example, I wanted to buy a 1TB internal hard drive, in Taiwan it’s 2850NT ($86) but I’ve seen the same drive on sale in the US for $80 or less.

The trick is to find stuff that’s hard to find in the States. Like Japanese games or weird electronics. Like a beefier battery and a dual microSD to memory stick adapter for my PSP for about 700NT total.

PSP stuff

Or an NES-cartridge-style hard drive dock that supports eSATA for 750NT.

Afterwards, a family friend took us to this really nice Japanese buffet near the Zhongshan station called Shin Yeh.

Shin Yeh

Food Report: Japanese Food Buffet.

The short version: Evil. Way too easy to overeat. Even writing this hours later I’m still full.

End with this awesome sign my sister found:

Just look at it.