today is a national holiday which means i didn't have to work. so peter and i decided to take the train to hsinchu and spend the day wandering around.

upon arrival, the first place we ended up at was the eslite bookstore. i ended up buying this book on old taiwan stores. basically, it's jam packed full of pictures of old toys, movie posters, and other wonderful memorabilia. there's even a list of places where you can see or buy things seen in the book. the book is in chinese, but it's mainly pictures and a lot of the writing is brief so that i should hopefully be able to translate most of the book without too much trouble.

i also picked up this magazine devoted to things from the 50s to the 80s. it's divided up into different sections: fashion, toys, comics, tv games, music, and bikes(as in scooters and motorcycles). there are lots of pictures of toys i'd love to have in here. thumbing through this magazine reminds me of thumbing through the sears catalogue when i was a child drooling over all the toys i hoped santa would bring.

after the bookstore we walked around a bit and stumbled upon the hsinchu image museum. a combination museum and movie theater. the museum area was pretty small. they had a lot of old posters on display as well as old film equipment. the staff were super friendly, and told us about the history of the theater. apparently it was built by the japanese and was the first theater to have air conditioning in taiwan. during ww II the roof of the building got blown off. they tried to get us to the go the film that evening, but sadly the film had no english subtitles so that was a no go.