Guanghua Market: Taipei

We hustled around Guanghua Market and the surrounding streets for a few hours before our flight out of Taipei. Electronics were definitely less expensive, laptops, monitors, audio equipment, etc. We spent a lot of our time in shops looking at cell phones. All the shops were cash-only, and as a ‘white guy’ it was pretty clear I was a foreigner and they raised there prices noticeably so. A little bit of bargaining and things were back down to reasonably good deals though. Everyone was armed with calculators to show shoppers prices–which made it easy to punch in a few numbers and bring it back to American dollars for sanity purposes. The real deals for electronics seemed to be on the no name products, the knock off mp3 players, iPod look a likes and Asian branded cell phones I’d surely never heard of (nor could I read). Shops were mostly divided into new and second hand equipment. I almost picked up a remarkably cheap unlocked Nokia 8800, but lost my chance when I opted to keep searching for a better deal and ran out of time. We did grab a few nice GSM phones and if we had a longer time there I think we probably would have gone crazy exploring these affordable markets!