Since late last month, a noodle shop in New Taipei City (新北市) has been serving “free” noodles to people in straitened circumstances in honor of the Italian tradition of caffe sospeso, or suspended coffee, and the practice has begun resonating with other small nearby businesses.
The noodles are not actually given away by the shop, but are paid for in advance by other customers so that they are reserved, or “suspended,” for people who cannot afford to buy their own.
Local media reported that Yen Lin-ying (顏林蔭), who has run the shop in a market in Banciao District (板橋) for 32 years, started asking customers late last month whether they would pay for noodles to give away to others after her son told her about seeing Italy’s suspended coffee movement on Facebook.
The response from customers was surprisingly positive, she said.
In two weeks, customers have paid for more than 40 “suspended” bowls of noodles at NT$75 each, and half of the bowls have already been served to needy people who are just learning about the help she is offering.
Yen keeps track of the suspended noodles on offer on a whiteboard in her shop.
Among those she has given food to are a single mother and her child who shared a bowl of noodles, and an unemployed man who ordered the noodles to go so he could give them to his elderly mother at home.
Since she began the practice, two other food shops and three stalls in the market have also offered to provide their own versions of suspended service.
“I never imagined that a mere bowl of noodles could have such an impact,” the 60-year-old was quoted as saying.
As in Italy, where the tradition of caffe sospeso has enjoyed a kind of revival because of hard economic times, poverty and hunger, Yen said she hopes the initiative will promote the power to do good so that more people can benefit.
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