Celebrating Culture at the Savannah Asian Festival
Great thing about being human is that we are diverse and unique in our oneness. And when we open ourselves to new adventures, we learn to appreciate ourselves even more. But you don’t always have to travel half way around the world to experience something new. Sometimes a good festival can give you an introduction to sights and sounds from abroad. Saturday I had a chance to experience music, dance and cuisine from Asian cultures of Polynesia, China, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand at the 16th Annual Savannah Asian Festival. It was a beautiful daylong event attended by diverse people from everywhere. A packed house… White, Black, Brown, Asian, mixed… everyone came out to celebrate the unique cultures from the East. And what a celebration! In addition to live performances and great food, we were also treated to shopping at the Asian Cultural Marketplace and a workshop on Asian and Middle Eastern Tea. This is an annual event and I hope to have the pleasure to attend again next year. In the meantime check out my video from Saturday’s performances...
I hope I don’t get in trouble, but I had been putting off filling out my 2010 Census Form, and now that I have filled it out, I may not have given the response that the government wanted to see. I had been aware of the controversy regarding the word Negro, and I wasn’t too eager to deal with it. Still, I completely expected to have the opportunity to check a box that read Black, or a box that read African American or a box that read Negro. Instead, last night as I sat down to fill out my form, I discovered lumped together under one box to check, read the line.... Black, African American or Negro. Hmm... So have we fully embraced this new millennium or have we traveled back in time to the 1920’s? I remember last month talking with my Grandmother regarding the latest census and asking what she thought about the word Negro being added, and her response was; “Why did they bring that word back?” My point exactly! The reasoning behind that was because the Census Bureau felt that some older g...
Sometimes I don’t feel comfortable in this small town that I reside in. Although most of the time, I think it’s just me. Over the past few years I’ve become a bit paranoid and feel sometimes that pairs of eyes are trying to get a hold of me. Now it doesn’t help here that South Carolina is a conservative red state and that from time to time I’ve seen a confederate flag hanging over the balcony of the apartment across the parking lot from me. Nor does it help that at one time my office was so charged politically that I called in sick the day after President Obama was elected. Still despite all of this, I have felt relatively safe in my surroundings, albeit a bit uncomfortable. But tonight I experienced something so unsettling that I’m just not sure how I should label it. Lately it seems I’ve had a taste for barbeque. A few weeks ago I was intrigued by a quick conversation on identity with the cashier in the drive-thru at Jim N-Nick’s BBQ and today, I decided to visit a new barbeque resta...
I am so glad my parents decided to do their homework before they named me after a huge powerful figure such as Queen Nefertiti. Nefertiti was known for her beauty and her influence over her kingdom in Egypt and her pharaoh Akhenaton. Although there’s speculation of her birth place, evidence from an archeological dig back in December 1912, when her bust was unearthed, shows that Nefertiti was definitely a deep brown beauty. But not all of her successors have that trait in common. More than a thousand years later, another powerful woman ruled Egypt. Her name was Cleopatra. Cleopatra was of Greek origin and ruled during a period of Greek occupation of Egypt. She was very fair skinned and there is no evidence that there is a direct link to African Ancestry. You can find more details from the blog, BlackInCairo that I follow here... http://blackincairo.blogspot.com/2010/06/cleopatra-aint-black-noise-in-cairo-and.html . So all the folks in the Black community crying because Angelina Jolie is...
Great thing about being human is that we are diverse and unique in our oneness. And when we open ourselves to new adventures, we learn to appreciate ourselves even more. But you don’t always have to travel half way around the world to experience something new. Sometimes a good festival can give you an introduction to sights and sounds from abroad.
Saturday I had a chance to experience music, dance and cuisine from Asian cultures of Polynesia, China, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand at the 16th Annual Savannah Asian Festival. It was a beautiful daylong event attended by diverse people from everywhere. A packed house… White, Black, Brown, Asian, mixed… everyone came out to celebrate the unique cultures from the East.
And what a celebration! In addition to live performances and great food, we were also treated to shopping at the Asian Cultural Marketplace and a workshop on Asian and Middle Eastern Tea. This is an annual event and I hope to have the pleasure to attend again next year. In the meantime check out my video from Saturday’s performances...
sounds like a fantastic celebration! How exciting that you were able to go.
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