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International festivals are fantastic. Tech had one this afternoon, and I just got back from a several-hour pilgrimage through the student center in which I ate many unusual things and engaged in many unusual activities.
The food. Don't even get me started. I wound up spending almost $20 on various items, but it was so worth it. I tried a bunch of stuff from all over the world, but my favorited had to be this fantastic passionfruit mousse from Brazil that they served with a glass of cashew juice. Did you know that cashews actually have a pear-shaped sweet fruit, and that the nut bit is attached to the bottom and encased in a shell that contains similar chemical irritants to those found in poison ivy? Fascinating and really, really good. I also had this Indonesian dessert involving jackfruit, coconut milk and bright pink tapioca spheroids over ice, which looked bizarre but was delicious, and a host of other things from various Southeast Asian and Mediterranean booths. Nom.
There were a number of traditional dance groups performing in the middle of the student center, including several varieties of bellydance. One of my friends from swing dancing was part of the bellydance troupe as well, and after their official routine was over, I somehow found myself getting dragged into a demo. Somebody tied one of those gauzy scarves festooned with jingly doodads around my waist and tried to instruct me how to shimmy. I do not shimmy very well at all, and am afraid I rather resembled this:
Regardless, good times were definitely had.
So I ate the food, drank tea from three different continents, and talked to lots of cool people about losts of cool things. It's events like this that remind me why I love travel so much. The world is full of so many fabulous things to experience, and to me, at least, there's nothing better.