Underground Shopping Malls
Trip Start
May 07, 2009
1
13
Trip End
May 19, 2009
Taipei, Taiwan
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
The whole underground shopping complex comprised of several shopping malls. We started with Zhongshan Metro Mall (中山地下街). It started with a corridor that displayed several artistic pictures on the wall. Most were artists' impressions of some sayings using altered pictures. A walk to the end of the metro mall would lead to Zhongshan Metro Book Mall (中山地下书街) and finally Zhongshan Station (中山站). Zhongshan Metro Book Mall, as its name implied, comprised of shops that sold mainly books. We spent quite an amount of time here browsing through the books.
It was 12pm when we retracted our way back to Taipei Main Station and had lunch at a small noodle outlet. I had my last Taiwanese beef noodle for this trip - and I would definitely miss the taste. After lunch, we continued to Taipei City Mall (台北地下街), which had much more varieties. I bought a set of six maid figurines from a comic shop. It was the last set on the shelf and I did not hesitate for long to buy it.
One of the most fascinating shop in Taipei City Mall was Gun Heaven (枪天堂), an air or automatic electric gun specialty store. It was not a store that could be seen in most countries, including Singapore. We went in to take a look, knowing too well that we could not buy any of the items back to Singapore. The air or toy guns looked almost like the real ones. There was a dessert shop here which we went in to have some cold dessert and take a break.
The last two destinations were Station Front Metro Mall (站前地下街) and Taipei New World Shopping Centre (台北新世界购物中心) which we quickly browsed through without taking fancy to anything. As the time ticked closer to 4pm, we returned to Taipei Main Station and had our EasyCards refunded before going back to Taipei Traveler Hostel to collect our baggages.
We went to the first terminal of Kuo-Kuang Bus Company (国光客运) where the airport transfer (NT$125 per pax) was located. We bought our tickets from a counter and waited for the bus to arrive. We were early, which was a lucky thing as the queue for the airport transfer got longer within 15 minutes. The bus arrived and we boarded it. The journey took about 40 minutes to Taoyuan International Airport, without traffic jam.
At 7.10pm, the Jetstar flight took us back to Singapore.
