Four senior citizens who volunteer to help Japanese tourists at New Taipei City’s Rueifang Railway Station were honored yesterday by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
The Golden Road Awards is a prestigious event for ministry employees and people in the industry, with 54 institutions and individuals receiving commendations this year, the ministry said on Tuesday.
The four are Lee Chun-chang (李春長), 91; Wang Hsiao-tui (王孝敦), 90; Hsu Chen Pei (許陳配), 89; and Chen Chin-feng (陳金鳳), 86, it said.
Photo: Cheng Wei-chi, Taipei Times
Many Japanese visit Rueifang District (瑞芳), as sites such as Jioufen (九份) and Jinguashih (金瓜石) were significant during the Japanese colonial era, it said.
Hsu Chen, who speaks fluent Japanese, in 2008 was asked by her son, then chief of the station, to organize volunteers to help translate for visitors, the ministry said.
The team works year-round and can be seen answering questions from visitors from Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as Taiwanese, about the station’s services and local attractions, it said, adding that the station has received letters from Japanese visitors thanking the volunteers for their assistance.
The original 12-member team is now down to four, Lee said on Tuesday, adding that they were motivated by a desire to help the development of the district and hopes someone would pick up the torch.
The team is charged with answering questions from Japanese tourists and helping them find attractions, although they also help people from other nations, he said.
Taiwan has a reputation for hospitality that he upholds in his work, a big part of which involves helping people find lost items and navigating train services, Lee said.
When tourists ask for help locating a lost cellphone, Hsu said that she always asks to call the number, as the gadget is usually buried in the visitor’s pocket or purse.
The ministry also presented a lifetime achievement award to Tsai Pan-aur (蔡攀鰲), a retired National Cheng Kung University professor of civil engineering, who is known for his contributions to flexible pavement design around the nation and mentorship of influential civil engineers.
During his 30-year career, Tsai conducted important research on asphalt and concrete, and emphasized the practical application of theory to his students, the ministry said.
After retiring in 1999, Tsai founded the Chinese Society of Pavement Engineering, which continues to play an important role in maintaining road quality throughout Taiwan, it said.
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
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
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