More Culture

Saturday, we went to the Asian Festival here in Tallahassee. It's practically a prerequisite for our family now, because of my little asian sister, Tabitha. You see, my parents are part of a group called Tallahassee Families With Asian Children (TFWAC), and this group always displays a booth at the festival. The booth provides information about TFWAC and gives children a space to do crafts. My parents signed up to help with the crafts. They sat on a blanket in the grass and made panda masks, hats and red paper lanterns with the children that wandered by. Noodle and I came (Hopers and Daddy stayed home for a nap) and helped out also.

The Asian Festival grows every year, and I've heard that more than 10,000 people attended this year. It is held at the downtown Park Ave. chain of parks and is packed with crafts, vendors, delicious food, and people from all over the world. Among some of the countries I saw represented were China, Japan, India, Taiwan, Philippines, and Korea.

We spread out in the grass (see first photo) to watch a few of the acts on the main stage. The second photo show a group doing a Japanese parasol dance. One of my favorite acts was a group of students that were visiting from Taiwan. The kids wore bright, matching costumes and showed off impressive skills while engaging the audience with smiles, claps and gestures. They jumped rope. Not your run-of-the-mill jump rope act either. They flipped and bounced in coordinated groups with lightning-fast spinning ropes. They also threw tops with ropes so that they landed (impossibly) on tiny tables across the stage while dancing and jumping around. It was great entertainment! Noodle was mesmerized. She wanted to know how they could do all those neat things. Practice, I said. Practice, practice, practice. It was another great learning experience for her.