Hypermarkets

Even though there are small, family-owned stores on every street in Taiwan, there are also huge hypermarkets that sell everything from groceries and clothing to scooters and automobiles. During our 2nd week in Taiwan, my niece (I think she's actually the same age as me) and her family brought us to one in Taipei. I'm not even sure what the name of the store was but it was right next to a Costco and a Carrefour, a French chain of hypermarkets that are popular in Taiwan but I have not seen any here in the U.S. We do however, have a lot of Costco stores.

All seven of us piled into their Mitsubishi Lancer and we went grocery shopping. I took some pictures with the Treo:


Restaurant on the first floor of the store. I didn't fly 14+ hours to eat California Cuisine. What is California cuisine anyway?


Hey you, no frolicking!


Durian... lots of durian. You can smell the durian as soon as you walked into the store even though they were on the 4th floor.


Liver? Intestines? Lung? Looks like all three!


Mmm... salmon and frogs


We had dinner at Kiki Restaurant on XinYi Road (信義店路). The dishes were pretty good but a bit small. That's pork in the front and tofu in the back. They had the best braised string bean dish I ever tasted although it was really really spicy. Dinner for 7 came out to about NT$1500 including 11(!) bowls of rice for 5 adults/2 kids.


My niece's boy Darryl. She is originally from Malaysia and currently teaches English in Taipei so her kids speak some English although with a Singaporean accent.

The store also had a music section. My parents bought a 20-disc Karaoke VCD package and I bought this CD+DVD by Koda Kumi for NT$350. I really like this song but have no idea on the lyrics and the video is pretty weird. The DVD that came with the CD is region 3 and it's been a pain trying to rip videos to my iPod.