I always thought it was what the places in Bladerunner where the people who made the snake scales were was based on. You would go along and be told that the man over there had that particular kind of resistor.
More like Taipei, I think ... which also has vast electronic doodad markets. Well worth a poke around, even if you don't have a use-case for a snake or an SCR the size of a beer can :-)
