Ian Wright, the Globe Trekker host on Discovery Travel and Living Channel, visited Taiwan earlier this week.
He has visited Taiwan on four previous occasions. Wright said he loves Taiwan's people, and judging by the popularity of the Lonely Planet programs that he hosts, those feelings are reciprocated.
"I was so surprised that so many people in Taiwan watch the show. Last time I was in a market, every five steps, people would call out to me. I'm a rock star here," Wirght said arching his eyebrow. "You're mad, absolutely, but I love you."
PHOTO COURTESY OF DISCOVERY CHANNEL
The backpacker host came to Taiwan last weekend to promote a new program, which is of a completely different ilk from those he has been doing for the past 12 years. Taking off his trademark slop jacket, he showed off a fine designer suit. After visiting Taiwan, Wright jetted off to Hong Kong to meet celebrity Karen Mok (
Has the tux changed Ian Wright in any way? "Suits are still like fancy things to me. I am not a different person. It's almost like an interesting experiment. It's just like I'm going to another world."
In the first episode, Wright barges into Karen Mok's life. He crashes her fashion shoot, hijacks her karaoke booth, plays the voice of an animated animal in a movie, eats her pudding and fights her trainer. How does he get away with such antics?
"Most of the time, everyone's there with the same purpose, and you've talked to people before you go on anyway. Everyone knows it is fun," he said, "I never ever use personal attacks, I try not to do that, it's too easy, but it's not fun."
Before becoming a TV presenter, Wright had traveled through Egypt for a couple of months, Nepal and India for seven months, Guyana for three months, hitchhiked though Ireland, and gone all around Europe.
Wright said traveling was an amazing lifestyle, but being away from home for seven months a year, he wishes he could spend more time in London. "It's not fun being left, doing hard work, doing all the laundry alone," he said.
The jovial Englishman believes that spending too much time pondering the imponderables of philosophy detracts from life's rich experiences. "Things come. Keep looking, meet different people, and exchange ideas. There is no rule," he said.
The globe trotter never worries about his backpack. "There is no secret, there is nothing mysterious about a rucksack. All you need is money, passport, a change of clothes, and forget the rest," he said.
"I never travel without my sketch book," said Wright, a long-time painting enthusiast. Though he doesn't think too much before hitting the road, on returning home he likes to reflect on his travels.
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
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
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