Every year in November or December, the university where I teach has a culture festival. International students from all over the world set up booths and sell food that they make to other students and teachers in the university. The fall is usually sunny with blue skies, and even though it’s been unusually rainy this fall, the morning of the culture festival dawned bright and sunny.
My good friend, Kendra, who is also sharing my apartment has been heavily involved in the culture festival this year, so I have gotten all of the inside scoop. She set up a booth for the USA and sold M&M cookies, sloppy joes, and peach tea. Some people were disappointed that there were no hamburgers, and some people insisted that the sloppy joes were hamburgers, but most people really seemed to enjoy the food.
Kendra and her team of volunteers have been buying supplies, planning, and coordinating for over a month, and the days before the festival were a whirl of activity as they baked dozens upon dozens of cookies, pounds of ground chicken in sloppy joe sauce and made sure everyone knew where to go at the proper times. It seems that out of everything, the communication was probably the hardest part of the entire ordeal.
My house smelled like cookies for several days before the festival, and I couldn’t complain—especially because Kendra gave me samples!
I arrived at the booths for the culture festival about 30-40 minutes after it started, and the wide, tree-lined road was already crammed full of booths with volunteers selling food, and people wandering between booths.
I parked my bike off to one side and entered the madness. Some friends were supposed to meet me there, but none of them had arrived yet, so I decided to get a head start checking out our options.
The road was wide and both sides of the road had tents with blue tops. But even with a large area between the booths, there were so many people pressing in around me that making forward progress was a challenge. But everyone was smiling and laughing and saying hi to friends.
Throughout the day, I was constantly turning around when people said, “Alison!” to see my students from this semester or previous semesters smiling at me. Some asked to take a picture together. A lot of students I didn’t know also asked to take pictures together. And today, I didn’t mind.
Kendra noticed how crowded the area was and told me that she was thankful she had a booth with tables between her and all the people. I didn’t mind the crowd. Everyone was smiling and having a good time. Lots of the booths had people dancing out front with random people from the crowd. Several of my students told me that they loved dancing with the students from Ethiopia.
Several years ago, the normal location for the food street was under construction, so they moved it to the football field. There was a lot more space, but for some reason, I didn’t enjoy it as much. Everything felt a bit spread out, and I didn’t get the feeling of togetherness and camaraderie that you get when you are surrounded by hundreds of other people.
At one booth, a few of my friends wore costumes from their home countries in South America and took pictures with curious Chinese students. I saw a few other friends that I like to play soccer with at the Ethiopian booth. When I went to investigate, Nati gave me a giant plate of Ethiopian bread (Injera) topped with various flavors of meat in some sauce. I tried to pay, but he insisted on giving it to me.
Carrying the plate of food in one hand and trying to eat with the other, I moved back into the mob of people moving from booth to booth. I passed France, Kenya and Zambia, Canada, Iran, Solomon Islands, and others. At Japan, I ran into another friend who told me about the octopus or sweet dough balls available, and then pushed me in the right direction after I paid for the dough balls. We tried to find the line, but things seemed a bit unclear, and I walked away with a tasty dessert along with my unfinished Ethiopian food. My Japanese friend wanted me to take a picture with the girl in a kimono, but my friend that I was supposed to meet had arrived, and I wanted to try to find her at America.
Rather than moving back into the mob, I headed behind the booths where there were a lot fewer people, mostly observers sitting on the steps of the teaching building, enjoying the food that they had bought. I found the USA booth and my friends, but I didn’t have any extra hands to buy a sloppy joe. I shared what I had with my friends and then we continued searching. After finishing the food from Ethiopia and Japan, I did finally get my mini sloppy joe, and it was a nice taste of home.
Shirley shared her chicken wings with a delicious yogurt sauce, and we both got baklava from Yemen. That was wonderful! At Congo, I took a picture with another friend from soccer and bought some nuts that were also yummy. Since I knew that vegetables would be scarce, I had mainly just had vegetables for lunch, but then we saw a booth for Jordan/Palestine, and they had a wonderful little salad.
I had finished quite a few dishes, but I was still holding and eating several things when a few more students came up and asked for an interview.
I agreed to the interview because I thought it would just be a quick question or two, but they wanted to find a quiet place off to the side and asked 4 or 5 questions. The questions were about my experience of studying in China.
“But I’m a teacher,” I said.
“No problem, we can just change the questions, and you can talk about your experience teaching in China,” the students replied.
Another student wanted to take a video with me for her homework, asking about my experience of learning English. When I clarified that she wanted me to talk about learning English, she seemed to think that my being a native speaker wasn’t quite what the assignment was looking for, so she wandered off to find someone else.
An hour and a half after arriving, and lots of pictures and plates of food later, Shirley and I agreed that we had probably had enough. Since she used to attend my university as a student, we have a bit of a tradition to attend the event together, and this year was just as wonderful as always.
After eating so many delicious snacks and different kinds of food, I didn’t need to eat dinner that night. A banana was more than enough for the evening!
