I went to the Heritage Days festival yesterday. A fine time to take a dose of other cultures. I went with a co-worker who is working in Canada temporarily so she can apply for a visa to return to the states. So, that’s an added bonus of culture.
We walked from Whyte avenue all the way to the park, which is about 4km. Add on the run on Wednesday and Thursday, and I was fairly exhausted for the Sunday morning run today.
But, let’s talk about the festival. It was nice. The Iberian-Canadian exhibit had the best performance with the martial-arts dancers. The song they sang got stuck in my head for awhile after. Usually I just go for the food and try to avoid the culture, but I got more of it this time.
The thing is fairly well organized, but it could be better. One idea I had was instead of having all the pavilions in a semi-line, they should instead be in the form of a map of the world. However, I can also think of problems with that. For instance, popular exhibits like France would be totally dwarfed by other countries like India. (Not to say that India isn’t popular, but I recall long lines for the French exhibits.) That could probably be solved by stylizing the map. But the biggest problem is that countries that neighbor each other frequently don’t get along. Ethiopia would be next to Eritrea. China next to Taiwan. Serbia next to Croatia. Israeli vs. Arab. And most importantly, France next to Italy.