The New Taipei City Government is looking to recruit new immigrants and their children to serve as tour guides in response to a surge in tourist arrivals from Southeast Asia.
Citing Tourism Bureau statistics, the New Taipei City Tourism and Travel Department said 437,016 Southeast Asian tourists visited the nation in the first eight months of this year, an increase of 36,169 over the same period last year.
Thanks to the central government’s “new southbound policy” and its streamlined tourism visa process for applicants from Southeast Asia, the number of tourists from the region has grown steadily, the department said.
The trend underscores the need for the city, which has 72,498 new immigrants from Southeast Asia, more than any other city or county in Taiwan, to find tour guides who can speak Malay, Vietnamese, Thai or Indonesian, to help promote tourism, the department said.
It does not matter whether the aspiring guides are Taiwanese, new immigrants or their children, or other foreigners, it said.
The city is to offer a free three-month training program for potential guides who can speak a Southeast Asian language.
The training program is scheduled to begin on Friday next week.
Free textbooks and lunches will be provided, and participants willing to take the national examinations to become certified guides will receive NT$1,000 to cover the registration fee for the national guide examinations, the department said.
The city hopes to register 45 people for the course and wait list of five back-up candidates, and new immigrants and their children will be given priority, the department said.
Those interested in the in the program can find further details on the department’s Web site, ecoshintour.com/ntpctourguide.
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