Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Ma first participated in a promotional event held in the Southgate Market, one of the 18 public markets financed with NT$6 million from the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Department of Commerce in order to refurbish the facilities and improve hygiene.
"In Taipei, eating out is always fun. Taipei is the perfect city for chefs to demonstrate their skills in Taiwanese gourmet dishes, including Chinese fare and even Western fast food," Ma said.
"Wherever you come from, Taiwan or overseas, the Taipei Season for Chefs will excite your taste buds. Come savor the flavor of the very best of Taipei's international cuisine with your friends," Ma said.
The promotion included savoring traditional food, a charity bazaar and an anti-SARS exhibition put on by the Southgate Market.
"The Southgate Market is the best public market in Taipei. [It's] dry and clean, and the vendors are friendly," said Ma. " I've been living in Wenshan district for 34 years, and my family likes to shop in the Southgate Market. My mother is acquainted with the vendors here."
Ma said that when he shopped there for last year's Lunar New Year, one vendor told him "Your mother just came."
"It shows that the traditional market plays an important role in the public's daily life," Ma said.
Department of Commerce Director General Liu Kun-tang (
Later, Ma served as the auctioneer for the charity bazaar and raised NT$40,000 by selling an engraving and pastry. The money will go toward a scholarship program for poor students, according to the Taipei Municipal Market Administration.
Ma also played a spinning top game, after receiving some instruction from the Chinese Folklore Skills Association.
Later Ma moved over to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall to take part in an event aimed at revitalizing the tourism industry that has been affected by SARS.
Ma join the opening of the 2003 Taipei Season for Chefs, organized by the city's Tourism Bureau and the Tourism Commission.
The Taipei Season for Chefs will run until September 14.
The sponsors have designed the "Taipei Food Passport" which includes a map of Taipei, information about tourist hotels, specialty restaurants, tourist night markets, recipes from the top seven chefs in Taipei, and 50-percent-discount coupons offered by hotels and gourmet restaurants.
The food passport is available at Taipei Tourist Center, the Travel Information Service Center, Taipei's Sungshan Airport and various other venues around the city.
Ma again served as auctioneer in a charity event, this time selling off gift coupons provided by four five-star hotels and eventually collected NT$15,300 for the Kuang Tzu Care Home (
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching