Uninvited visitors to the Taipei International Flora Exposition yesterday scolded the organizers for not allowing them in, forcing staff to once again break the rules on the second day of the trial run.
The event organizing committee had planned to open the Yuanshan Park area to only 5,000 invited guests every day during the first phase of the trial, but allowed all uninvited visitors to enter the site on Saturday to avoid confrontations. Dozens of uninvited residents from nearby districts and other cities blocked the front gate of the expo and bickered with staff over the guest rules after being barred from entering.
“I’ve been waiting here since 7am and now you are telling me I can’t go in?” asked Chen Yu-shin (陳郁欣), a Tainan resident who arrived in Taipei on Saturday and sought to enter the site with her family.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
Yeh Chi-hui (葉圻輝), a resident of Datong (大同) District in Taipei, joined Chen in protesting against the expo trial’s rules.
“I came into the park on Saturday and there’s no reason I cannot go in today,” he said.
Expo staff at the entrance initially insisted that uninvited residents could not enter the site, but the director of the organizing committee, Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文), later agreed to allow all visitors to enter. More uninvited residents showed up in the afternoon, including many foreign workers who converged on the site after church. The total number of visitors was estimated at 20,000, beating the 12,960 who visited the site on Saturday.
Chen Hsiung-wen played down concerns over a breakdown in visitor regulations, though he called on the public not to come to the expo until the final phase of the trial run between Oct. 25 and Oct. 28. He nevertheless said expo officials would adopt a “flexible strategy” if some people showed up uninvited.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilor Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄) yesterday accused the Taipei City Government of failing to stick to the trial run plans and confusing the public with vague rules.
“What else can we expect from the city government if it cannot even keep the number of visitors under control?” he said.
Meanwhile, Deputy Taipei Mayor Allen Chiu (邱文雄) said the organizing committee had collected 1,277 questionnaires from Saturday’s visitors, with 74.4 percent saying they were satisfied with the expo. Those who gave bad reviews complained about the lack of signage, trashcans, rest areas and restrooms in the park area.
Chiu said the organizing committee had already increased the number of trashcans and seats, and would soon put up more signs.
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