French expat Cyril Vergnaud lives in Pingtung and speaks French, Chinese, Hoklo (more commonly known as Taiwanese) and English. He also speaks Esperanto.
Tomorrow, Vergnaud and students of Esperanto from Pingtung Community College will hold the Esperanto Festival (屏北社大世界語學員), an annual event that is open to the public. There will be a NT$100 door charge to cover drinks, snacks and a gift bag for everyone who attends, he said.
Esperanto is a language devised to enable communication among the world’s different language speakers. Vergnaud told the Taipei Times by e-mail that he became interested in learning the language purely by chance.
Photo courtesy of Pingtung Esperanto Festival
“I first met two Esperantists who live and work in Pingtung,” he said. “One guy, Reza Kheir-khah, is from Iran and a woman New Zealand, Simone Roberts, is also in our group here. While I had never studied Esperanto before, I soon learned from Reza and Simone that it’s easy to learn. So I decided to give it a shot. One thing led to another and we’ve got this annual festival.”
“What I discovered was more than just a language,” he said. “I became a member of a very interesting international community. I fell in love with the philosophy of Esperanto, as much as I did with the language,” he said.
Last year around 80 people attended the festival, Vergnaud said, many of whom were expats living in southern Taiwan and other countries such as Canada, Thailand, Spain and Japan, among other nations.
“In Taiwan, most Esperantists are Taiwanese,” he said. “But because we use this language a lot to travel, foreign travelers often visit us here in Pingtung.”
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated