The daily number of visitors to the newly opened Panda Hall at Taipei Zoo reached its full capacity for the first time since it opened on Monday, with the 22,000 numbered slips all gone by around 1pm yesterday.
The zoo had estimated that more than 100,000 people would try to visit the hall on Monday amid the panda frenzy. However, the two pandas, Tuan Tuan (團團) and Yuan Yuan (圓圓), only attracted about 18,000 visitors on the first two days of the Lunar New Year holiday.
Thanks partly to the warm weather yesterday, visitors began to line up outside the zoo long before the doors opened at 8:30am and the parking lot near the zoo was full before noon.
Taipei Zoo director Jason Yeh (葉傑生) said the number of visitors to the zoo usually reached a peak on the third day of the Lunar New Year holiday, after families had completed observance of all New Year traditions and began planning trips for the rest of the holiday.
Although the zoo extended the visit time allotted to each visitor in the hall to about 14 minutes, visitors continued to complain about being rushed through the exhibit. The zoo also received a growing number of complaints about pricey food and souvenirs in the hall.
A girl surnamed Chen accused the panda gift shop in the exhibit for raising the price of panda hats from NT$199 to NT$280 a day before.
“This hat was NT$199 yesterday, and it cost me NT$280 today. It's too pricey, and I don't understand why they increased the price of the hat from yesterday,” she said.
Ma Yu-yu (馬玉宇), manager of the gift shop, said all the NT$199 hats had sold out on Tuesday, and the new hats were more expensive because they were made of better quality materials.
The two pandas remained active yesterday, eating bamboo, wrestling and following each other around their compound. In response to speculation that Yuan Yuan was in her estrous cycle, Yeh said the two pandas, both four years old, were just playing.
The pandas would not be reproductively active until March to May, he said.
Yeh said the pandas ate six meals a day and normally took a nap after having lunch at 12pm.
The zoo suggested that visitors avoid visiting the exhibit at noon as the pandas would most likely be sleeping around that time.
The zoo encouraged visitors to call 02-2920 8889 ext. 8800 for information about the updates on the remaining number of visitors' slips before heading to the zoo.
The Taipei City Government urged the public to take public transportation to the zoo to avoid traffic jams.
Until the Lunar New Year holiday ends on Sunday, the zoo is open daily from 8:30am until 5:30pm. Normal operating hours (9am to 5pm) will resume on Monday.
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