With the addition of Core Pacific City (京華城) shopping mall, Taipei
now boasts two mega-malls where young and old alike can indulge their
wildest consumer fantasies.
Never mind the fact that the mall has been dogged since its opening by
the Taipei City Government, which has called on the management to halt
business because the 11th and 12th floors failed fire safety inspections
and the mall has been open without a business operating license. The
mall's management, not daring to spoil the fun for Taipei's shopping-mad
citizens, have simply paid the paltry NT$30,000 fine levied for running
a business without an operating license and kept floors B3 to 10 open.
Juan Hsin-nang (阮信囊), spokesman for Core Pacific Group, was quoted
last week after the soft opening as saying: “We don't want to
disappoint our customers.” Up to 100,000 people rewarded Core Pacific's
defiance of safety norms each day last weekend by swarming the place to
take advantage of price-slashing opening sales.
Putting aside its initial problems for a moment, it must be stated that
the mall is an impressive piece of work. Fifteen floors — minus two for
the time being — are stuffed with over 900 retailers, restaurants and
entertainment facilities. You get an immediate impression of the size of
the complex when entering at the Civic Boulevard entrance at the base of
the six-story rendering of Core Pacific Group's spherical corporate
logo. Once inside you see the back of the sphere, and down three floors
to the food court. Looking up is a dizzying sci-fi-like network of
escalators that criss-cross their way in and out of the sphere.
As with most shopping centers, the emphasis at Core Pacific City is on
fashion and accessories, with a heavy tilt toward women's products. But
the sheer size of place — three times larger than the recently opened
Breeze Center — and the range of retailers selling everything from the
stodgy to the scandalous basically guarantees that you'll find what
you're looking for.
There are also a Watson's, Eslite Bookstore and a Wellcome supermarket
and tomorrow night the entertainment aspect of the mall will kick into
high gear with a rave starring DJ Adam Freeland at the Plush lounge bar
and club on the 12th floor. If the party goes forward, it will be
because the 12th floor has passed its fire safety inspections and the
roof hasn't caved in, as a chunk did on the B1 level on Tuesday morning.
Core Pacific City is located at 138 Pateh Rd., Sec. 4, Taipei (臺北市八
德路4段138號).
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS