I got sulphuric acid before and nobody said anything or asked for ID. Was using it for my scooter battery and had to water it down.
Pretty much. Sodium alginate doesnât seem to be crazily expensive either (about 650 TWD per kilo, from a cursory look on Shopee). The others should be dirt cheap.
On an unrelated note. All this talk about chemicals and prices reminded me that recently I had to buy some enzymes for my work. A few miligrams of it are literally in the thousands, madness.
1 Like
Taiwan dollars? Yeah, some enzymes can be really expensive (difficult to purify and/or proprietary I guess).
In my former academic life I worked on some antibiotic natural products that were essentially priceless (produced by some bacterial strain isolated from under a particular pebble or something in India in the 1990s and patented by one of the big pharma companies, later sold to the biotech company who sponsored my PhD). I think I had a gram or so of it in my lab freezer drawer at some point when my sponsor bought the IP, which is probably a sizeable chunk of the total amount of it that has ever existed on the planet, at least in pure form.
No idea what the value would have been, but similar compounds that are commercially available are currently around NT$15k per milligram. 
1 Like
Just curious, when do you arrive in Taiwan? And welcome back! 
I had an interesting encounter when transiting through Dubai airport many years ago.
I had my laptop and an external USB hard drive (3.5-Inch) in my carry on. The HDD was full sized in a metal case without any labeling, just a button and an indicator light at the front.
When passing a checkpoint a young inspector took it out of my bag. He froze, I could see panic in his eyes. He looked and me and mumbled: âWhat? ⌠What is that?!â
I calmly explained that it is an external hard disk drive. He didnât seem to understand. Luckily a supervisor came over and told him it was fine.
That guy thought he was holding a bomb, a button push away from exploding. 
1 Like
Youâd think in the Middle East theyâd know all about the different sorts of bombs used for blowing up aircraft 
1 Like