Went to the annual Taipei Game Show today. It's on from Friday 2/6 to Tuesday 2/9, so I just reached it on it's first day. A bit late though. It's open from 10 am to 6 pm. As with the book exhibition last week, I arrived at 4 pm. Too late to try stuff. But still plenty of time to locate all the booths and take pictures of loads of stuff. Took 148 photos while there, which is almost half of what my camera can contain. And that's in just 2 hours. (I make it save a raw together with a JPEG, so total size per shot is usually about 22-23 megabyte. I could cut it down to 2-3 per shot by not saving raws, should I have to snap more when I'm going back.)

In this place there's many booths and several stages for different kinds of performance. Some of them they have turnaments. At others, you can just jump up on and get a brief instruction like this guy above is, and you're in a competition of some sort, competing for freebies.

That's one of the entrances into Ximending. I went there with my classmates yesterday. It reads Shimen in Latin letters, but you know... There's a very good reason why Taiwan has it's own system of phonetic characters instead of the Latin alphabet. Actually, Xi means west. Men means door. So Ximen is actually the location of the west door of old Taipei.

This is one of the more popular places in Taipei so they have bus-stops equipped with screens that will tell you when the next bus will arrive. Neat.

You know what? I'll stick the barbeque into the photos/portal webpage I set up some other day instead of writing a blog about it.
Because today I went to Ximending after school with my taiwanese classmastes to have some fun.

Ximending is by far the most popular place in Taipei amongst young people. It's not the most important of Taiwanese shopping culture, but it's probably the best candidate for a youth related subcultures center. It's the place you go after school with your friends, not only because it's not really too far away from most schools in Taipei City, but also because it's the place that's the most fun if you're part of the younger generations. It's also called the Harajuku of Taiwan for some pretty good reasons. Mainly because it's very japanese influenced I think.