Activities celebrating Czech music, literature and cinema are to be held in Pingtung next week as part of the “Czech in Pingtung” festival, the first big event organized by a foreign institute in Taiwan.
In cooperation with the Pingtung County Government, the Czech Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei is to stage the festival from Wednesday to Sunday next week, sharing arts and culture from the Czech Republic with the people of southern Taiwan.
The week is to begin with a virtual academic workshop with officials from the Czech office and Taiwanese scientists at the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium, followed by a meeting with students at the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology on Dec. 2, the Pingtung County Government said.
Photo courtesy of Pingtung County Government via CNA
A free classical music concert by the Taipei Chamber Players is to be held at the Pingtung Performing Arts Center on Friday next week, featuring music from the operas of pioneering 19th-century Czech composer Bedrich Smetana.
On Saturday next week, the Pingtung County Library plans to inaugurate its Czech Books Zone, which is to feature works by renowned Czech writers, including Milan Kundera and Franz Kafka.
The same day, the library is to host a book release for Hua Shu Chi (花束集, “bouquet”), a Chinese translation of Kytice, a collection of ballads by Czech folklorist and poet Karel Jaromir Erben, which were translated by Lin Shih-hui (林蒔慧), Sia Pei- lun (夏沛倫), Lu Chi-hung (呂齊弘) and Chen Yu-ju (陳宥汝).
That evening, the 2020 Czech-language film Charlatan, loosely based on the life of Jan Mikolasek, an early 20th-century herbal healer who was jailed by Czechoslovakia’s communist regime, is to be screened at an outdoor plaza in the library.
The Pingtung County Government in a statement on Monday thanked the office for “taking the Czech Republic to Pingtung,” praising it for giving locals the chance to enjoy Czech culture without having to travel abroad.
It said that despite COVID-19 reducing economic, trade and travel activities around the world, “beautiful things like arts and culture are not constrained by time and space.”
In March, Patrick Rumlar, head of the Czech Economic and Cultural Office, visited Pingtung, and was impressed by the facilities there, including the performing arts center, which is home to Taiwan’s third-largest pipe organ, the statement said.
Rumlar also praised the award-winning Pingtung Civic Park, also known as HEITO 1909, a 20-hectare urban park carved out of the ruins of a Taiwan Sugar Corp factory, and the VIP Zone, an urban renewal project in an old military village, it said.
Rumlar was eager to travel to Pingtung again as soon as he learned of the Taipei Chamber Players’ concert, which inspired the five-day “Czech in Pingtung” festival, the statement 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