Postcards: Good fortune finding kits in MENG country

Dear fellow glue sniffers, 

You must have seen, owned, built or at least heard about MENG kits made in Taiwan. They are high-quality kits. Especially the 32nd-scale Fokker Dr.I Triplane that they licensed from Wingnut Wings.

Map of Ximen in downtown Taipei. Do you find the hobby store?

My good fortune and scientific collaborations with a Taiwanese professor from the late ‘90s landed me an appointment with National Taiwan University (a.k.a. NTU) some 10 years ago to visit Taipei annually, teaching a graduate-level research course. NTU is the Harvard of Taiwan with brilliant and highly motivated students. 

The course always ran from 4-7 p.m., hence I had the rest of the day to trace MENG kits in Taipei hobby shops.

In MENG country, I thought it would be an easy goal to accomplish. As it turned out, I was dead wrong.

The first year I went to Taipei, my host and friend, who is also a fellow armor modeler, gave the order to the students to take me downtown to Ximen in Wanhua district to his favorite hobby shop. I rushed the class a bit in hopes that we would then go to THE HOBBY SHOP. 

And so we went, by metro and then on foot for 10 minutes in a fancy shopping district, into a department store-like building, up and up on the escalator, to arrive at a hobby shop in the corner of the floor. The place was overwhelmingly loaded with kits. 

The green building.

I asked for MENG kits and was directed to a shelf in the fourth row in the back, where I found a Convair F-102 “Delta Dagger” piloted by President George W. Bush and a Kayaba Ku-4 “Katsuodori” Ram-Jet, both 1/72nd scale. Because there were literally many, many hundreds of kits, I decided that I would visit this shop again.

The next visit came several years later, last October, when I took the metro to Ximen station. And then the adventure began. 

Look at the map in the picture. I hope you can read Chinese characters — traditional Chinese, not Mandarin, which is used in the PR China but not in Taiwan. I cannot. So, where is the hobby shop?

I combed the streets and finally remembered that the building was green. I found a green building. I went to the entrance to take the escalator, but the building was closed. 

Daa – it was Sunday at 11 a.m. The building opens from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. I asked myself, “Is this the right building?”

It was my lucky break because on the list of shops at the door, there was ONLY ONE in Roman characters that read “U2” and something in Taiwanese. 

The Apollo 11 Saturn V kit in 72nd scale from Dragon  

This must be it! Nobody in the right frame of mind would name a shop U2 unless he knows that it is the name of the famous Lockheed spy plane. 

I went back the next day just to realize that the U2 shop on the 9th floor was a music store. 

Disappointed, I took the escalator down and on the 4th floor, I saw a Gundam ad. I walked around the 4th floor, and Bingo! In the corner, there was the model store. 

This time, I was shopping for old spacecraft kits, wanting to get the Apollo 11 Saturn V kit in 72nd scale and the LLM in 24th scale. After half an hour searching through the shelves, I found both of them and more. 

The problem then became how to fit them into my suitcase. You probably know that I wasn’t going to leave them behind.

This April, my wife and I went back to Taipei to give my last course under the contract that ended on May 31, 2026. 

My wife is into birds like I am, but not the kind of birds that I like, called airplanes. I have tried to convert her once before. I found a kit with a dozen HO scale pigeons, but she has not finished painting their fancy camouflage yet. We have only been together for 46 years, so she still has time to learn how to weather a pigeon.

Now, back to the store in April. The store had even more kits since the last time I was there last October. 

The kits fill the store shelves from floor to ceiling.    

You have to be a slim person to fit between the shelves that are covered with kits from the floor to the ceiling — look at the pictures. 

With her waiting for me outside the store, I quickly realized that I would not have the usual hour to browse through the shelves for rare kits. 

It was hopeless because the kits are in random order. I tried, but after 10 minutes glancing at my wife’s impatient face waiting for me outside, I had to come up with a quick fix.

The store owner, an elderly gentleman (80+), spoke as much in Hungarian as in English, both equal ZERO. But when I wrote on a piece of paper that I wanted the 1/72 Revell kit of the space shuttle with the Hubble telescope and the Chinese Tiagong 2 spacecraft kit, he smiled and waved to his granddaughter.

She disappeared between the kit-loaded shelves, and not a minute later, she brought the two kits and handed them to me. 

Typical Taiwanese efficiency!

I paid and was out of the store in record time with my marriage saved.  

Your Sprue Brother,

Gabor