The Tourism Bureau yesterday gave special contribution awards to several individuals from overseas at a ceremony in celebration of the Tourism Festival.
Among the winners of these awards, Joseph and Julie Rosendo had secured several nominations for National Daytime Emmy Awards for their travel program Joseph Rosendo’s Travelscope, for which they produced a special edition in 2013 featuring the Lantern Festival.
Joseph Rosendo also won an Emmy for outstanding lifestyle/travel host.
“Before I came to Taiwan, all I knew about Taiwan was the cheap toys made here,” Joseph Rosendo said. “Then I learned over time that Taiwan was a very high-tech place.”
He said that he and his wife’s impressions changed when they came to do a show in Taipei in 2007. While they visited sites like Taipei 101, they also went to the night markets and saw how Taiwanese make tea in a tea factory.
“We realized that Taiwan is much more than a high-tech country; it has a lot of culture and history, which you do not get, by the way, in China,” he said. “I like to tell people if they want a real China experience, they should really come to Taiwan because the Chinese experience is still alive and well in Taiwan. Not so much in China anymore.”
The couple was supposed to do one half-hour show and ended up doing two shows because they gathered so much material.
“The great thing about Taiwan is there is always something. We did not even know if we were going to have one show when we first came to Taiwan, and now we have done seven shows. We are even talking about coming back to do a show on national parks,” Rosendo added.
Malan Breton, a Taiwan-born fashion designer based in New York, was also honored. He lived in Tianmu (天母) until he was seven years old. His grandmother was from Taichung.
“For many years, I have wanted to come back to my roots in Taiwan. I want to produce a collection encompassing many elements of Taiwan,” Breton said, adding that he draws inspiration for new designs from Taiwanese lanterns, Aboriginal cultures and Hakka floral fabrics.
Breton’s latest designs were presented at New York Fashion Week.
“The show is covered by 30,000 media [representatives] throughout the world and is my way of introducing it to many people from other countries,” he said. “We have people from all over the world, and not many of them have ever been to Taiwan, so there is a real opportunity to see what I could impress upon them through fashion and through music. We have an orchestra playing Taiwanese music and dancers from Taiwan as well.”
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