In 2011, Taitung County (台東) held its first hot air balloon festival. Since then, the Taiwan International Balloon Festival (臺灣國際熱氣球間年華) has attracted folks from across the globe. Although usually held for 38 days, the festival will last 45 days this year; Taitung County Commissioner Justin Huang (黃健庭) extended the festival in order to help attract tourism in the region following the fatal earthquake in Hualien, just north of Taitung, in February.
The festival will feature over 39 different balloons, including famous landmarks or icons such as Christ the Redeemer statue and Minions from the movie Despicable Me.
In addition to hot air balloon rides, which typically last 30 to 40 minutes and cost NT$500 per person, the festival also includes light shows and concerts. This year, the festival boasts a special show staged with an open house at Taitung Air Force Base; the show combines hot air balloons with a display of military fighter aircraft and a musical performance. The annual festival will also showcase a light show at the National Taitung University Library (臺東大學圖書館), which was named by the world’s leading architecture Web site architzer.com as one of eight unique national libraries in the world.
Photo courtesy of balloontaiwan.taitung.gov.tw
■ For complete details, visit the Chinese and English-language Web site: balloontaiwan.taitung.gov.tw
■ Until Aug. 13
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby