You're looking at the house that Louis built… with help from Prada and Gucci. The superluxe galleria before you opened last fall and has added some Vegas flash and swagger to a staid downtown block. This port city was heretofore better known for welcoming convoys of containerships than for hosting purveyors of hoity-toity wares.

A Dutch design firm with a multinational name is responsible for the twelve-story structure and its pseudo-moiré facade. It took engineers two years of experimenting to make the lights dance correctly across the concave exterior. Job well done: Internet postings of the ever-changing luminous choreography have made a video darling of the building. The real star of the show, though, is the interior, where staggered escalators spiral in a Guggenheim-ish way up the core of an atrium. The wide all-white space-age landings that lead to the shops look ready-made for George Jetson to shuttle in on his aerocar.

You zipped from the nation's capital down the west coast to this city in ninety minutes on a new high-speed train. You rode the new metro, constructed for an upcoming mini-Olympics, across town to meet your destiny with consumer bliss. Once you've had your fill of shopping, you might enjoy a simple walk along the local Love Canal (which was recently cleaned up) and a stop at the café in the former British consulate. The city recently promoted a dollar menu exclusively for its foreign guests at the food stalls in the night market, a sweet deal considering that a dollar here means just pennies to you. Townspeople have a strong preference for beef, so you can always dip into the restaurant on your right—see, it says steak house right there on the sign. If you're looking for a change of pace, the surrounding county has hot springs, aboriginal homelands, and a town famous for its beautiful hand-painted paper and bamboo umbrellas. Next December will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the brutal squashing of a pro-democracy movement in this city. Ultimately, the incident helped to usher in a new beginning for the nation . . . and, it appears, new purchasing power.

Where are you, anyhow?

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