Assisted by the Alliance Cultural Foundation, the Taitung County Government recently announced its intention to train two groups of taxi drivers in the county, in the hope of establishing a professional tourism taxi business and thereby enhance the quality of tourism in Taitung.
On Nov. 27, Taitung County Commissioner Justin Huang (黃健庭) visited the first group of taxi drivers enrolled in goodwill driver training courses and encouraged them to provide both domestic and foreign passengers with quality service.
The Alliance Cultural Foundation arranged for assistant professor Patrick Su of National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism to teach the taxi drivers at the Visitor Center located in the old railway station on Nov. 29 and early this month.
The tourism goodwill course includes simple English and Japanese conversation on tourist subjects and how to introduce scenic spots, people, culture and the culinary delights of Taitung to visitors to eastern Taiwan, likely to be brought in on future direct flights between Hualien or Taitung and Hong Kong as well as Japan.
The taxi drivers responded well to the training course, which will help them to make visitors to Taitung feel as welcome as possible. Su told Huang and Taitung Department of Culture and Tourism Director Chen Shu-huei (陳淑慧) that the taxi drivers were glad to have the one-day course.
Huang said that taxi drivers were an important part of the effort to promote tourism. After introducing a connecting bus service at the end of June, the county government specifically asked the Alliance Cultural Foundation to invite Su to teach Taitung taxi drivers how best to upgrade the quality of tourism in Taitung.
The county government plans to establish a Taitung Tourism Goodwill Taxi Service Team next year, hoping to provide foreign visitors with diverse, mobile and safe tour guide services by making taxi drivers an integral part of the Taitung tourism development effort.
After the two hour-training course, the top 15 taxi drivers will be selected to form the goodwill tourism taxi service team. The government will then issue them with special identification uniforms and stickers, as well as post related information on the official Taitung County Web site and publicize the taxi service team through its various activities.
‘HUMILIATING’: Aletheia University students called on the school to apologize for limiting former professor Chang Liang-tse’s access to its Taiwan literature archive The Aletheia University Student Association yesterday called on the university to apologize to retired professor Chang Liang-tse (張良澤) after it prevented him from accessing the Taiwanese literature archive at its Tainan campus by changing the lock on the building. Last month, the university changed the lock on the building without warning, barring Chang’s access to the archive that he had “singlehandedly established,” Chung Yen-wei (鍾延威), the son of the late writer Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政), wrote on Facebook on Friday. The university in 1997 created the first department of Taiwanese literature in the nation, and Chang, now 82, was the department’s first-ever chairman,
ALLEVIATING FEARS: The CECC would only announce public places where it is difficult to identify everyone there at the same time as the couple, minister Chen said The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday announced six places where two locally infected COVID-19 cases had visited between Thursday last week and Sunday, urging people who had been at the places at the same time to monitor their health. The couple, cases 838, a doctor, and 839, his nurse girlfriend, were reported by the center on Tuesday. The doctor had treated a patient with COVID-19 last week before he began suffering symptoms on Friday, while the nurse began suffering symptoms on Saturday. They work in the same hospital in northern Taiwan, but the nurse had not worked with COVID-19 patients, so
SECOND RULING: Israeli-American Oren Shlomo Mayer refused to sign a court transcript, complained about the court translator and said the trial had been unfair The High Court yesterday upheld New Taipei City District Court’s verdicts on four men convicted last year in connection with the 2018 murder and dismemberment of a Canadian citizen on the banks of the Sindian River (新店溪). It found American-Israeli Oren Shlomo Mayer and American Ewart Odane Bent guilty of homicide and the abandonment and destruction of a corpse, with Mayer sentenced to life in prison and Bent given a term of 12 years and six months, for the death of Sanjay Ryan Ramgahan, whose body parts were found in a riverside park under Zhongzheng Bridge in New Taipei’s Yonghe
A lawyer and a prosecutor yesterday castigated what they called a lenient ruling by the High Court on Luo Wen-shan (羅文山), whose prison sentence was reduced to two years, which he does not need to serve, after he was convicted for receiving illegal political donations from China to meddle in Taiwan’s elections. Investigators found that Luo, who retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant general, had accepted NT$8.38 million (US$294,604 at the current exchange rate) under the guise of political contributions from Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Xu Zhiming (許智明) and people in Hong Kong from 2008 to
RSS