There are plenty of bookstores in Taipei. Particularly around Gongguan I have seen them in abundance. Most of them are quite small. Also second-hand book shops can be found. My Chinese is still way too bad to read a real book, but nevertheless, I enjoy looking at them and sometimes I manage to decipher a character or two. Also, I have bought some children’s books with BoPoMoFo annotation to practice a little.
There are also some bigger bookstores, the Eslite chain providing some of them. I also found this blog entry quite helpful. To Eslite, I went yesterday because I was looking for Heisig’s book for Traditional Characters. It was quite crowded, or at least, what I as a European would call crowded. This particular Eslite store is open 24h, it’s the one close to Dunhua MRT.
Heisig’s book wasn’t there. There was only a small section of Chinese books for foreigners. So I went to the children’s section, where the books are nicely illustrated, so I can at least guess what the story is, and got myself the following piece of literature. Cute, isn’t it?
This is the story of little biàn biàn.
After being left behind by a dog, he tries to find friends. A mouse, a couple of bunnies, a snake…
… but nobody likes little biàn biàn. He doesn’t smell nice.
Eventually, he meets a farmer. The farmer isn’t bothered by the smell. He is happy to find little biàn biàn!
He takes little biàn biàn with him and puts him on his field.
Here he spends the rest of his life nurturing carrots and everyone is happy!
xD What a lucky bianbian