The Tourism Bureau aims to attract more female tourists from Japan and South Korea this year with a music video featuring boy band Fahrenheit (飛輪海) and South Korean actress Ku Hye-sun.
The popular boy band has been the Tourism Bureau’s representative in Japan and South Korea for the last three years, while Ku, the lead actress in the popular South Korean TV series Boys Over Flowers, was chosen as the bureau’s representative for this year.
Members of Fahrenheit will act as tour guides for Ku as she visits tourist attractions around the nation and tries Taiwanese cuisine. Targeting women aged 35 and below, the music video will be entitled Touch Your Heart, which is also the name of the video’s theme song.
Cheng Yi-ping (鄭憶萍), section chief at the bureau’s international travel division, said that the bureau decided to choose Ku because she was famous.
“Boys Over Flowers has aired in Japan, South Korea and many Southeast Asian nations, so audiences in those countries will be familiar with her,” Cheng said. “She is very cute and has a very good image. When we asked her if she wanted to participate, she immediately said ‘yes.’”
So far Fahrenheit has taught Ku how to make Taiwanese spring rolls and she also learned to sing Taiwanese Opera at the National Center for Traditional Arts in Yilan County.
The crews started shooting the music video yesterday.
“Compared with the temperature in South Korea, which is about minus 10°C right now, the weather in Taiwan feels like spring,” Ku said.
The Tourism Bureau is also planning to shoot another music video to attract tourists from Southeast Asia. It will feature pop diva Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) and director Wu Nien-jen (吳念真).
Statistics from the Tourism Bureau showed that about 4.4 million people visited Taiwan last year, registering a 14 percent growth over 2008. About 2.3 million came for tourism, an increase of 29.7 percent over 2008.
The nation’s top four sources of tourists were Japan, China, Hong Kong and Macau.
Tourists from South Korea grew by 32 percent last month, halting a decline of 13 consecutive months.
In related news, the Tourism Bureau will today unveil the designs of the main lantern and the handheld lantern for this year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival, which will be held in Chiayi City at the end of next month.
Both the main lantern and handheld lantern, to be unveiled at the Grand Hotel, will feature a Tiger design for the year of the Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac.
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
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
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