Celebrate Culture
Wednesday Mar 28, 2007
Last Thursday we had a "Celebrate Culture" event at the kids' elementary school. There were booths for various countries, with folks at them to show various items and talk about them. I recall Germany, Scotland, Australia, Mexico, Brasil, Ghana, Nigeria, China, Korea, Israel, India and Iran. Lots of good food at these booths too. We got "passports" in which we could get stamps from the countries. I thought there was supposed to be some contest for getting as many countries as possible, but I don't recall any prizes or anything.
After the first hour, there were groups doing dances and songs. Interestingly, they were all from Asian countries: Korea, India and China. I don't know exactly why that was, but it was curious that no other groups represented danced or sang. Is it that these groups are more recent immigrants? Or they're more tied to their culture? One interesting thing to note is that we have a large number of folks from India and China in particular at our school.
The Korean folks did some drumming, which was very cool, and then a drum dance, where their twirly costumes were very nice.
Some Indian children sang the Indian national anthem, and introduced representatives from the various regions of the country. The final Indian presentation was a couple of fifth grade girls doing a dance from a Hindi (Bollywood?) movie. From my untrained eye they seemed to know the moves. The music started out sounding pretty traditional, from the few Hindi movies I've seen, then switched to something much more modern, with electronic instruments and drums. Pretty cool
The final presentation was a woman from mainland China who did something I thought was called "Tai Chi ball", but I'm not really sure. It involved a yellow ball, maybe the size of a tennis ball, and two racquets about the size of badminton racquets. She moved to the music being played, and it appeared she somehow had the ball glued to those racquets, except the few times she dropped it. Interesting.
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