International Festival

"Every countries are beautiful". It was a sentence I've heard from an old man from Iran. Yeah, I met him at International Festival last September (09/30) in Raleigh. It was an awesome event. In my opinion, that event is one of many ways to promote a lot of interesting cultures from many countries in the world. Moreover it could create piece in the world. I went there with my Local Coordinator, Julie and other exchange students to represent our organization, CIEE.

Here we go! Mrs. Joy from CIEE told every exchange students hosted in North Carolina to do presentation about our countries. We were from Indonesia (me ^^), Germany (Miriam and Hannah), Pakistan (Shah), Spain (Anna), Jenya (Ukraine), South Korea, China and Brazil (Peder). I was attracted with different cultures I heard. We represented our countries proudly.I wore "kebayak" and "batik" skirt when I went there. I also brought my big paper contained many pictures that showed "Indonesia is amazing". I told them about tourism places in Indonesia, Indonesia's tradition and Indonesia's cuisine. It was about 5 minutes. Absolutely, the audiences was so interested especially when I turned my paper and showed them "Ote-Ote" (makanan lezat dari Jawa timur). Mrs. Julie said "Ote-ote makes me hungry". It was so funny. hahaha.

Miriam, Anna, Kate and I walked around the festival. I visited stands from Swiss, Iran, China, Poland and other countries. The place was so big but I didn't feel tired anymore because we really enjoyed that time. Miriam and I also ate Italian pizza. It was very delicious. Since I arrived here, I started to love pizza. Yummy! Then I walked around again and stopped at AFS stands. I met Mr. James, one of host families. He hosted a girl from Canada. We had fun conversation. He also knew my friend, Yamin from Indonesia (hosted in Chapell Hill). I had made appointment with Yamin to meet in the festival. But he just came at 01.30 p.m (30 minutes before I left). I met Yamin and I was really happy because I could meet Indonesian. I missed speaking Bahasa Indonesia. We went to a stand from Immigrant Association. We wrote some sentences about our goals in USA.We just wanted to show that we did good in America. This organization was created in order to erase miss understands of American to people come from another countries.