1、Category: 4. Local Specialties

2、Description of Our Community:

　　Taipei City, located in the north top of Taiwan, is a big city with 2,620,000 populations. The city has been set up for 120 years. Both in the past and at the moment, Taipei, the creative city, merging different ethnic groups, new and old concepts and the public need, has been founded and stood towering like a giant for hundred years.

　　Being a progressive international city, Taipei’s economy is flourishing, and business activities are all inclusive. It’s the first city in Taiwan and attracts a great deal of tourists to come a tour every year. There are more than 80% foreign tourists coming to Taiwan and choosing to go to Taipei necessarily. Therefore, Taipei City has the highest proportion of tourist shopping in Taiwan region.

　　Although the pineapple pastry is not derived from Taipei, there have been quite a lot of grand bakeries producing the pineapple pastry with their professed techniques for a few decades. Therefore, the pineapple pastry is not only the recollection of Taipei residentsbut also the best gifts when the tourists come back home.

3、Summary of Our Project:

　　The pineapple pastry is greatly popular for hundred years in Taiwan. It has always been one of the traditional pastries that are widely liked by the people. Taipei is an international sightseeing city, there are more than 700 bakeries selling the pineapple pastry because it is easy to carry, right in size, keeping a long time and reasonable in price. When the tourists go back home or people go abroad, they always choose the pineapple pastries as the gifts for their friends and relatives. To empower the pineapple pastry the new life like the gold brick, the government unites with the bakeries to announce "Pineapple Pastries in Taipei, Healthy New Image". The activity pushes the pineapple pastry to be the “Taipei gifts” and expands it to the nations.

　　The purposes of this project are to understand how the pineapple pastry becomes the “Taipei gifts”, to introduce the well-known pineapple pastry in Taipei, to spread the products in the nations and to bloom up the tourism in Taipei. Through this project, we expect the pineapple pastry will be famous all over the world.

4、Our internet environment:

　　Our school provides ADSL for linking to internet with an upload speed of 2MB and download speed of 384 KB. We have completed a wireless internet this year and can receive the internet message in the campus everywhere.

　　There are four computer classrooms and a multi-media center for making teaching materials in our school. In each computer classroom, there are 35 computers for the students to have the computer class. Also, there is a desktop computer in every classroom of the school and there are more than 90 notebooks provided for teachers to personal use. Totally, we have 106 classrooms at school. So, approximately, there are more than 350 computers in our school, including the computers for the administrative use. Every computer is provided with an exclusive line for connecting to internet and various web services are available for application through the server. The school’s servers include Web Server, Mail Server, DNS Server and Proxy Server that provide convenient online application environment. Every student has his or her own E-mail address and has the capability of web making.

（1）Computer Shortage

　　Although we seem to have a lot of computers in our campus, the class computers, bought by Education Bureau of Taipei Government in 2001 and 2002, are out of date. There are no re-new plans because the government is short of budget. Moreover, the maintaining contract, signed by the Information Bureau of Taipei Government and the manufacturer, is at the expiry in 2006, hence the damage rate of the computers in the classrooms is extremely high. The multi-media center for making teaching materials has been out of work and the computer classroom is busy for lessons, so we always borrow the notebooks to do the work.

（2）Responsibility System

　　We had adopted the responsibility system to finish the project. Since we, the researchers, came from six different classes, it was rather difficult for us to find the same time to work together. So we had been divided into 6 teams and did our work independently. We met with the directing teachers only two sections each week. During the working period, there were still many activities in the campus, such as Sports’ Day, Graduation Ceremony, school trips, science exhibition…etc, which took the students a lot of time, so time was limited. We adopted a responsibility system to finish the project. Each team was responsible for their part, and finally all of us work together to finish the whole project. In the researching process, we felt busy, but acquired an abundance of knowledge.

（3）English not well Acquainted with and Japanese Impassability

　　At questionnaires, although we were not well acquainted with English, we asked Euro-American tourists questions with an effort. But it was a different situation when we faced Japanese tourists. Generally, the Japanese tourists were not acquainted with English, and we don’t know Japanese at all. All we could do was to communicate with them by the gestures and the broken English, which both of us were not well acquainted with, too. The process of the interviews was really difficult.

6、Maxim in our hearts

　　In the project, we well understood the producing process and special features of the pineapple pastry. We also knew the mystery why the pineapple pastry became the “Taipei Gift”. We found each store had their secret of formulation and special features, so the pineapple pastry could be promoted in Taipei City. In the researching process, we were deeply impressed with the pineapple pastry, and, from now on, we will choose the pineapple pastry as the representative gift of Taipei City for our friends and relatives who live abroad.▲Top