The Taipei Children’s Recreational Center in the Yuanshan (圓山) area celebrated its 75th anniversary yesterday and invited children under the age of 12 to visit the center for free through April 5 before it closes for more than one year starting next month.
The center, which was built on the site of the former Yuanshan Zoo and Children’s Amusement Park, is an important childhood memory for many Taipei residents and has remained a popular attraction for families.
After celebrating its 75th anniversary, the center will close its doors to visitors until September next year to allow for the construction of exhibition areas for the 2010 Taipei International Gardening & Horticulture Exposition.
The Taipei City Government will set up three exhibition areas for the expo and build a new amusement park in the Mei-lun Park area of Shilin District (士林).
Center director Chien Chian-chuan (簡健全) said the news about the center’s closure had attracted more visitors. About 15,000 people visited the center on weekends on average and the number of visitors could reach a new high this week, he said.
Democratic Progressive Party Taipei City Councilor Chien Yu-yen (簡余晏) challenged the city government’s decision to close the center for the expo, saying it had sacrificed the children’s “happy land” to promote the expo.
She said the city government had focused its efforts on building the three exhibition areas and ignored the maintenance work needed for the center’s facilities, including the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel. The center might be abandoned after the expo, she said.
Chien Chian-chuan said some staff would stay in the center to maintain the facilities.
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’: A man watching Taiwanese military drills said that there would be nothing anyone could do if the situation escalates in the Taiwan Strait Many people in Taiwan look upon China’s military exercises over the past week with calm resignation, doubting that war is imminent and if anything, feeling pride in their nation’s determination to defend itself. After a visit to Taiwan last week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China has sent ships and aircraft across an unofficial buffer between Taiwan and China’s coast and missiles over Taipei and into waters surrounding the nation since Thursday last week. However, Rosa Chang, proudly watching her son take part in Taiwanese military exercises that included dozens of howitzers firing shells into the Taiwan Strait off
RSS