More than 700 expatriates, as well as local residents, climbed the world's tallest building, Taipei 101, for the second year yesterday to raise funds for the 2007 Taiwan Youni International Climbathon for Charity.
Although tired, most climbers enjoyed the experience.
"[I'm] exhausted," said Marcus Bauder of the Shangri-La Hotel Taipei team when asked how he felt after climbing the 91 floors.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE GARDEN OF HOPE FOUNDATION
"But I'm feeling good right now ? It's fun, and it's for charity," he said.
There were also climbers who came well prepared.
"I went through an intense training regime during the past two weeks, climbing up to my third-floor office, I'm well-prepared," said Brandon Williams, an American who has been working in Taiwan for two-and-a-half years.
Some participants also expressed the hope that events such as this could increase understanding between Taiwanese and the expatriate community.
"It's really great to see both the locals and the foreign community participating in something like this together," said Elias Ek, a Swede who started his own business in Taipei five years ago. "Most of the time, the foreign community is just not visible."
Altogether, 750 climbers raised NT$1.8 million (US$54,100) for charities, said Mary Chua, director of the Community Services Center (CSC), one of the event organizers, along with ICRT, Taiwan's English-language radio station.
The Garden of Hope Foundation is one of the main beneficiaries.
Many firms, including the Taipei Times, also helped sponsor and organize teams for the event.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS