Helen and her nephew.

One side of the mall.

Inside the mall. As you can see from the movie posters, nearly all the movies shown at the theater are American.

Here's a shot from inside. You can see the giant department store sphere looming above and a few floors ahead.

Outside the mall, where the sphere protrudes out.

A statue and a Christmas tree outside.

More of the inside, with escalators criscrossing and several floors visible.

Under the sphere is seating for the food court. The food court is interesting, mainly because its a very western style, yet all the restaurants there are asian: Lots of different kind of asian noodles, japanese food, etc. Not much western cuisine.

Once it got dark outside, the place was lit up in a fairly interesting way.

This is the next day, after traveling to Hsinchu and staying with Helen's uncle (on the left in this picture). He took us to a state-of-the-art university lab where a lot Taiwan's semiconductor research is done, and later to UMC, a chip fabrication company (shown here). The monitors on the right show the cleanroom.

Again at UMC. I'm standing with a former student of Helen's uncle, who showed us around.

For lunch we went to a Native Taiwanese restaurant. The culture is relatively similar to Native Americans, but the cuisine seems more interesting. We had ferns for plates.

One of Helen's cousins.

A grasshopper, right before I ate it.

All of the food.

Some buildings at one of the universities in Hsinchu.

The front of the National Nano Devices Laboratories, which we visited earlier in the day.

Another building on campus.

A bridge over a pond. This is at a different university.

Another building.

The pond.