The annual Taipei Lunar New Year Festival begins tomorrow on Dihua Street and the nearby commercial district, offering high-quality dried foodstuffs and various other products to celebrate the New Year.
The festival, which runs until Feb. 12, will center on six of the capital’s commercial areas — Dihua Street, Ningxia Night Market, Huayin Street, the commercial area behind Taipei Main Station, Taipei Underground Shopping Center beneath Civic Boulevard and Bingjiang Market.
Huang Ching-sung (黃錦松), director of the Dihua Street Stores Association, said prices of dried foodstuffs had not increased since last year, but traditional medicine had gone up by between 5 percent and 10 percent this year.
Dihua Street, one of the oldest and most traditional shopping hubs selling Chinese medicine, dried foodstuffs and processed goods, is cooperating with Japan’s Hokkaido City this year and will also offer Hokkaido delicacies from fresh seafood to ramen noodles.
Taipei City Commerce Office director Liu Chia-chun (劉佳均) invited residents and visitors to visit Bingjiang Market, which is joining the other commercial hubs in the festival for the first time this year, and shop for top-notch cooking ingredients, from fresh seafood to exotic imports.
Bingjiang Market director Chen Shu-huei (陳淑慧) said visitors could expect to find fresh king crabs and other exotic seafood.
More information about the festival is available on the official Web site at www.2010newyear.com.tw.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,