The Tourism Bureau yesterday gave special contribution awards to several individuals from overseas at a ceremony in celebration of the Tourism Festival.
Among the winners of these awards, Joseph and Julie Rosendo had secured several nominations for National Daytime Emmy Awards for their travel program Joseph Rosendo’s Travelscope, for which they produced a special edition in 2013 featuring the Lantern Festival.
Joseph Rosendo also won an Emmy for outstanding lifestyle/travel host.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
“Before I came to Taiwan, all I knew about Taiwan was the cheap toys made here,” Joseph Rosendo said. “Then I learned over time that Taiwan was a very high-tech place.”
He said that he and his wife’s impressions changed when they came to do a show in Taipei in 2007. While they visited sites like Taipei 101, they also went to the night markets and saw how Taiwanese make tea in a tea factory.
“We realized that Taiwan is much more than a high-tech country; it has a lot of culture and history, which you do not get, by the way, in China,” he said. “I like to tell people if they want a real China experience, they should really come to Taiwan because the Chinese experience is still alive and well in Taiwan. Not so much in China anymore.”
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
The couple was supposed to do one half-hour show and ended up doing two shows because they gathered so much material.
“The great thing about Taiwan is there is always something. We did not even know if we were going to have one show when we first came to Taiwan, and now we have done seven shows. We are even talking about coming back to do a show on national parks,” Rosendo added.
Malan Breton, a Taiwan-born fashion designer based in New York, was also honored. He lived in Tianmu (天母) until he was seven years old. His grandmother was from Taichung.
“For many years, I have wanted to come back to my roots in Taiwan. I want to produce a collection encompassing many elements of Taiwan,” Breton said, adding that he draws inspiration for new designs from Taiwanese lanterns, Aboriginal cultures and Hakka floral fabrics.
Breton’s latest designs were presented at New York Fashion Week.
“The show is covered by 30,000 media [representatives] throughout the world and is my way of introducing it to many people from other countries,” he said. “We have people from all over the world, and not many of them have ever been to Taiwan, so there is a real opportunity to see what I could impress upon them through fashion and through music. We have an orchestra playing Taiwanese music and dancers from Taiwan as well.”
HASTY PLAN: Instructors must teach in a language they are not fluent in, while students are forced to learn new subjects in a tongue they do not know, teachers said The National Federation of Teachers Unions (NFTU) yesterday urged the government to thoroughly review its Bilingual 2030 policy, saying it has caused problems in elementary and high schools, and might affect the quality of education in other subjects. The government on March 28 changed its original “Bilingual Nation 2030” plan to the “Bilingual 2030” plan, no longer aiming to turn Taiwan into a Mandarin-English bilingual nation by 2030, NFTU president Hou Chun-liang (侯俊良) told a news conference in Taipei. Despite the change, the policy’s budget, resources and most of its content remain the same, causing unusual scenes on campuses, he said. Cheng Chi-yi
MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS: The trend is inevitable given modern lifestyles, but young people tend to seek medical help more than older people, an official said The number of people under the age of 30 in Taiwan taking antidepressants increased 16.1 percent in 2020 from a year earlier, the National Health Insurance 2020 Gender Statistical Report found. The number of people taking antidepressants has been increasing since 2011, and reached 1,468,716 in 2020, up 5.1 percent from 2019, said the report, which was released in May. The number of women using antidepressants always far exceeds that of men, it said. The growth rate stabilized after 2017, but a year-on-year increase in people taking antidepressants can be seen in all age groups, especially those under the age of 30, it
‘STILL RISKY’: The quarantine requirement for arrivals cannot be lifted, as COVID-19 cases have been rising in Europe and the US, the minister of health and welfare said The government might consider dropping a negative COVID-19 test result requirement for travelers from low-risk countries, but lifting the quarantine requirement for inbound travelers is still risky, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The CECC on Monday said it does not plan to further loosen border controls soon. National Taiwan University Children’s Hospital superintendent Huang Li-min (黃立民) said the “3+4” quarantine policy separates inbound travelers from family members for only three days, which is not enough to block the spread of the virus, so the government might consider changing it to a “0+7” policy. He also said that it might
Taiwanese singer Miu Chu (朱俐靜) passed away over the weekend after a battle with breast cancer, her family announced yesterday. She was 40 years old. The family wrote on Chu’s Facebook fan page that she died peacefully. “Thank you all for your concern. Miu, who was always full of laughter and always brought people positive energy with her music, left us peacefully on July 3,” the family said. The family asked for privacy at this time and said that details of a memorial service would be announced later. Chu was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020. She was an alumna of the TV reality show