No. The bí-hún place considered by most oldtimers as an institution closed earlier this year. Plenty of such places are closing, even if they were doing fine with long lines everytime they open the doors.
I was going to say old Hsinchu is still here, you just have to know your way around, but then I thought about how quickly they are disappearing. That statement might be true 10 years ago.
I will visit some of the old places before they are gone. Here in the South many closing from high rents. I cook a bit more nowdays, as fewer choices.
There is odd ball place on my list: Hsinchu style Pizza
You got to make reservations, and they have fixed time groups.
I was there in the early 2000s, and my assessment is that it was already bad, with a massive split between the old conservative city, proud of its history, and the new rich (salary wise) arrivals in the Science Park and the universities, who were educated in to be specialists in their fields but often ignorant and dismissive about Hsinchu’s culture.
This is partly a function of Taiwan’s education system because people then had NOT had adequate opportunities in the school system to learn much of anything about Taiwan (unless they were the old people educated in the Japanese colonial era who knew a lot about it). It was also a function of top-down planning during the Chiang Ching-kuo era in which the Science Park was dropped from the sky with no regard to local culture.
It was an unpleasant and incoherent mix, but that situation taught me a lot about postwar Taiwan and the costs of the dictatorship era’s (lack of) education and (lack of) consultation in planning mega projects.
If there is more respect for Tainan (and Chiayi too) right now it’s because the people doing the ground work to retain and revitalize these places were born after the education reforms and had a chance to learn more about—and actually care about!—the rich cultures in these places. I hope this continues.
Guy
Called for Holiday Christmas buffet in Tainan, it is $2000 for each human, is Las Vegas more than that now? Must be cheaper at Christmas as most American stay at home for a feast?
Well…those places always had their very well established own universities and elite locally. And Tainan CKU is a really nice uni.
Kaohsiung has had very good city management and planning compared to Tainan and Chiayi in particular. Tainan dropped the ball so badly with no metro. Chiayi was just poor.
What I feel is different now is that all these cities across Western Taiwan are getting large investments from TSMC and their associated electronics companies. It used to just be Hsinchu and Tainan and then it was Taichung and now Chiayi, Kaohsiung, Zhunan etc are getting quite big plants and investments. This unfortunately has a side effect of driving up property prices almost everywhere.
In the US we have REITs. Mom and pop investors can buy stakes. And a lot of investments are rolled into real estate by the finance whizzes.
Does Taiwan have something similar? That way everyone can invest and have a stake in property prices.
Last time I was in Vegas was 2016 or 2017, so I wouldn’t know. It wasn’t during Christmas.