Festival of Cultures

An Internet update: I'm back at the library, dealing with another day with no Internet at home. Yesterday, we were convinced that it was either our used router or the Internet set-up that was not working. We went over to J's friend Harry's house to test the router, and found out that it doesn't work. So we went and bought a nice, brand new one, took it home, and... the Internet still doesn't work. What are the chances that the router  AND the Internet itself would be broken? Anyway, a person from the Internet company will come today or tomorrow to try and fix it, and then hopefully we will be all set.

Okay, on to the Festival of Cultures! We were told about it in several shops, and each person was proud to tell us that there are many cultures in Whanganui, and that the festival would be very fun. We weren't sure what to expect, but we headed downtown to check it out.

There were shows all day, from countries all over the world. We arrived halfway through this performance, so I didn't hear where he was from, but the language sounded like a Pacific Island one, and the music was lovely.

As you can see, people had set up booths and were cooking amazing food from all kinds of cultures. I liked this one because it is raising money for an Early Childhood Centre that specifically supports Pacific Islander children in their cultural identity.

J got South African food (sausages, in particular) at this booth. He was eager to try it, because Lionel is originally from South Africa, and has been praising the sausages there. They were good, but not great, this time. Plus, they did not come in plastic boxes, as most of the food did, which highly recommended them to us.

I saw someone walk by with delicious-looking dumplings in a cardboard box, but when I ordered them, I wasn't quick enough to stop the man from putting them in plastic! Bad luck. On the bright side, they were the most wonderful dumplings I have ever tasted! They were from an Indonesian booth.

I think maybe the "cultural" label was set aside for a moment when this booth registered, but we didn't mind. We each got a 2 foot long piece of candy. They were filled with an odd marshmellow-ish stuff, which is not what we were expecting, but they were still pretty good.

This Vietnamese woman played a Dan Bau, which is an instrument with one string, which she plucked, and then changed the song by moving the metal rod at the end of it. It was amazingly beautiful and almost sounded like a person singing.

These children are part of the Samoan youth group, and they did a traditional Samoan dance. It was so neat to see children of such varied ages all dancing together, and feeling good about their heritage.