Taipei Travel

The area consists of 9 old red brick buildings housing arts, gifts, hand made items, toys, a movie theatre, art galleries showing art of famous artists, special events, like a dinosaur building for kids, a cat celebration of Fumeacats, (a famous Internet cat site) where you can buy cat knickknacks, a blow up bouncy room for kids, specialty food stores for honey, yam products. There are many coffee shops and little restaurants, including a pizza restaurant. This is a fun district to browse through and I particularly liked the toy stores; some with the latest anime toys, some Toy Story characters, Sponge Bob, Star wars. Everyone knows Hello Kitty and the latest new character created by Japanese parent company, Sanrio, is a woeful, sad egg yolk which has gained huge popularity. It's name is Gudetama. My favourite toy store was one of hand made wooden toys in miniature. At the front were glassed in display cases of turning music boxes, tops which spun, little wooden cars that were ‘driving’ around the other music boxes Adjacent to this brick area is a very large green park with playground for kids, lots of seating for adults to rest. There is a pond, a sculpture of a leaf growing out of the lotus plant. There are walkways, bicycle paths. Alongside the park is a street of many bus stops and an overpass bridge runs parallel to the street. This is a great area to visit on a weekend or holiday period in this city.

Mix of shop, restaurant and outside show to spend a nice spring evening. Two favorite restaurant : Piccola Botega an excellent Italian restaurant (Dish and environnement) or 光合箱子 華山店 ( ! )

Interesting place w nice architecture and all the local stores within. - it’s like a songshan cultural park (you get to see the local handicraft stores etc) there are also a few restaurants within the place so it’s great to spend a chill day here admiring the local handicraft and get a meal here ( do check when r the dates for moremarket openings tho- when we went there, we didnt have too much to see as it was the following weekend when there is an event)

As compared to Ximending or other popular shopping malls, i liked Huashan 1914 Creative Park as the gifts are more unique and architecture is nice. Good place to chill. There are adhoc exhibitions and flea markets over the weekends i believe.

These types of areas are becoming more popular in Asia. I saw 2 similar areas in Hong Kong. Theres plenty of little boutique stores that sells some interesting items. Its still a nice place to hangout if you have some downtime.