LIFE: Get some culture
Yesterday we had a lot of fun visiting the Auckland International Cultural Festival, just down the road from my in-laws' house. Huge event featuring people of pretty much every variety except Amish, tons of ethnic food, dance and more. Auckland is a hugely diverse city (there are parts of downtown I can walk and swear I'm in an Asian town), and the festival had folks from everywhere - Ethiopia, Finland, Kurdistan, China, Chile...Sights and sounds abounded, a fine place to just sit and people-watch for a while: Burundian drummers; prayer flags snapping in the wind; happy Sudanese refugee children with Kiwi accents playing at the playground; a buddhist monk walking around in orange robes with a high-tech camcorder strapped to his back; dapper African men wearing "I Love Eritrea" banners; tasty Malaysian satay in peanut sauce for sale, $1 a stick; a South African Zulu woman getting a Polynesian lei from a vendor; Maori kid eating ice cream; gaggles of Chinese kids texting their friends ten feet away on their cell phones; a diminutive Asian man playing an extraordinarily cheesy cover version of Lionel Richie's "Hello" on a pan flute; a booth of the "Auckland Oromian Association" (where is Oromia?!); fantastic Algerian sausage for sale; an Aussie-looking cowboy fellow with a handlebar mustache and shirt open halfway to his navel, displaying a rug of white chest hair; a dolphin balloon floating off into the sky, blonde woman below waving good-bye...
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