A student's view of the 2024 Millennia Culture Week
Last semester, we had a Culture Week festival at our school. Culture Week is a festival that our school celebrates once every two semesters. It involves bringing the culture of multiple countries together, usually done by students. The way culture week works is that there are booths, one for each country group. Then, every grade divides their kids into two country groups for culture week. On the day of the Culture Week festival, all the groups are in their booths, greeting the guests. After that, at the end of the festival, there's always a performance and an award giveaway.
Our entire class contributed to the Culture Week festival by representing Egypt and Russia. I was in the Russia group with my friends Alvaro, Hira, Arthur, Nara, Lal, Gian, Abia, Mika, and some other friends that I couldn't remember. We were divided into groups, one for performances, one for decorating the booth, one for the traditional food, and one for the information. I was in charge of the information group, with Hira, Arthur, Lal and Nara. But we decided we weren't making ordinary papers for information. Instead, we decided that we were making a magazine about Russia.
Making the magazine wasn't easy. We had to agree on what words we will use to describe each topic, we had to fix each others' work, and we had to put a reference on where we got our information and pictures. We also had to discuss about what things we were going to put in the magazine, and it was hard. The entire group argued about every tiny detail, and we even had to set up meetings just to work. Luckily, it was done just in time. I put the magazine on top of this blog, in case you want to see the final version of it.
Back to the magazine thing. Even though the magazine was finally done after a while, we still had to print it, and it was so long. It took so long by that by the time the magazine was done, we already made and painted all the decorations for the booth. Even if all of that's done, everyone participating in the Culture week is required to wear their countries' traditional outfits. So everyone in the Russia groups got into a panic. It's not like you can find some traditional Russian outfits on your local corner store. Somehow, we managed to find a store that sold Russian outfits, so everything was all set even though I looked exactly the same as one of my friends, Alvaro, except that he wore glasses. Plus, the clothes were so hot and uncomfortable that it made me super itchy, especially on the back. I walked around scratching my back like a monkey. Luckily, it didn’t leave a rash, only several pictures of me scratching like a whole colony of fleas living on my back.
Now, the funny thing is, Gian made the Russia flag that we're gonna use to decorate the booth. The flag was supposed to be white, blue, and red. Somehow, he made a mistake and painted it white, red and blue. I think Gian was kind of going for a Dutch flag because that semester we also learned about the Dutch colonization. We were giggling trying our best not to tell our little secret when one of the guests visited our booth and saw the flag!
After we gave our presentations we had our group performance. Our group performance was done by two people, Abia and Mika. They were doing a ballet performance named "Swan Lake", which was made in Russia. I didn't even know that Swan Lake was from Russia. So that's one thing that surprised me this week. Another thing that was surprising was that in the performance, you had to spin multiple times. I kind of felt bad because they probably got dizzy after that. But what made me feel worse was that they practiced every day after school. I was so glad that it wasn’t me!
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