Ballroom dance may be a mainstay in Taiwan, but a variety of new dance classes are spicing up the social dance scene in Taipei.
Catering to both the local and foreign communities, with classes in English and Chinese, several dance studios in Taipei are now offering salsa, tango, hip-hop and swing.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIWAN YOSEIKAN BODU
"Salsa is becoming quite popular in Taiwan. A lot of places are starting to hire live Latin bands and there seems to be a big salsa community emerging here," said Godfrey Zwygart, a director and instructor at Taiwan Yoseikan Bodu, a martial-arts center in Tienmu.
Hoping to cash in on the recent rise in popularity of Latin-style dance, the Yoseikan center has employed professional instructors to teach salsa, flamenco and belly dancing. "These are natural and sexy dances. People like to get dressed up and go out to the clubs and dance. The girls really love it," Zwygart said.
While beginner-level classes in flamenco get underway this coming Wednesday, both belly dance and salsa began last week. However, interested persons can still register and -- if demand permits -- additional classes will be added later.
Elsewhere in the city, well-established studios such as Wu Yi (
Classes at Wu Yi are open to the public and the center encourages people to drop by the studio and observe a class before making any commitments. It offers a wide range of classes from classical Chinese to salsa and caters to all levels, but English instruction is not always available. For some, however verbal language is nonessential to a good dance lesson.
"You don't need language. You just need to watch what the instructor does and follow, you can use body language to learn," Chiang said.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS