At the first time ever ‘Egg-roll Festival’ during the anniversary celebration, 53 couples kissed at the same time for 53 seconds on the University Commons. The sight of it immediately captured some media attention that day, Nov. 8, winning some deserved press coverage. These kisses electrified the atmosphere of the whole campus; even President Chang Horng-jinh was caught up with the fever and commented light-heartedly right before the beginning of the so-called ‘Show your love in 53 seconds’ event that he would definitely require longer than 53 seconds if he had been one of the participants!
Following this event, there was another ‘Kiss till the end of time’ contest. It was to test the endurance of the couples kissing in the heat of 30 degrees Celsius for an hour. Kiss and sweat at the same time? It was ‘hot’, for sure. A lot of girls held their partners as tight as a koala bear holding onto a Eucalyptus tree while they kissed. Some girls hung in the arms of their partners at a 45-degree angle, a challenging position that demands a high degree of agility.
As there was an NT$10,000 award involved, the couples participated in the contest put up with the heat and stretched their manifestation of love up to an hour. During their kisses, their friends and families were cheering for them by providing electric fans, wiping away sweat, and applying ice-cubes. There were even couples who managed to kiss and talk simultaneously, for example, Wong Lu-chung from the Graduate Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, demonstrated his stamina by kissing and circling the contest ground with his girl friend, during which he said to his girl friend tenderly: “We can do better. Come on, let’s go for it!”—a gesture that tugged at the heart of everyone around.
However, at the end of the hour, no winners emerged. The organizer, the Student Association, thus invited the last ten pairs to the podium to kiss for another minute. In this minute, they would be judged by the novelty of their kissing style by all the spectators present. Such a criterion triggered a series of unthinkable stunts ranging from swinging, twisting, and bending backward and so forth amid the laughter and wonder of all the spectators. Everyone was bowled over by the sight. The host, Tsai Jun-he, from the Department of Aerospace Engineering could not help but pointing out that such a kissing contest had turned into a ‘wrestling’ contest.
The contest was eventually won by Lai Chiu-hua, a sophomore from the Department of Public Administration with her boyfriend, Lin Kai-ming, a medical student from the Medical School of Chang Gung University. She was delighted and said that this event would be her best memory in her last year of college. Most of the other participants also expressed their enjoyment afterwards. They found the event fun and were pleased to be part of it. Yet, they all confessed that they would find kissing in the next six months not as tantalizing as before.
