I remember when my taiwan student visa was almost up and I still had half a month left for my class and to take my finals. I went to the immigration office and they told me to f*** off and do a visa run.
So I booked a flight and airbnb and took myself to manila for the weekend. I planned nothing beforehand so I ended up having to figure out what to do there. I found out that there's a lot of good fake markets and so I went to the one nearest to where I was staying and supposedly one of the more famous ones as well, which is called cartimar market.
This market has a lot of shoes with varying quality, but for the most part the fakes are of the high quality variety. it's really hard to negotiate lower prices here with the sellers but I guess it's part of the culture.
Contrasting with taipei, taipei doesn't really have a culture of trading fake items so everything you find in taipei will always be at full retail price. so coming to the manila markets is definitely refreshing to have more purchasing options.
I would say that this is definitely a good alternative especially if you don't have the means or patience to go to apply for a visa and go to mainland china's markets.