1201 international culture festa

today we had an international culture night, where 6 countries served traditional meals and performed dance and music. Japanese team gathered at 2pm and went to the supermarket to buy some ingredients of maki-sushi. Maki-shushi looks so beautiful and we thought international students would love it. Fortunately, a friend of mine from Singapore has a stuff to roll sushi so we borrowed it from him. We made not only maki-sushi but also onigiri with furikake. The makishussi contained spam, cucumber, and avocado. It took 2 hours to make 100 makisushi. Also we wear suit cause every team had to wear clothes which indicated its nations. Japan is famous for workaholic this was why we selected suits as costume. But to be honest, we didnt have any kinds of Japanese traditional clothes so we just had no options but to wear suit. 

Anyway, the event started with a lecture by a lawyer. He is now working at Leiden university diversity promotion department and he was used to be a refugee from Congo. He really believes that we human being are equal and have possibility to live together without any conflicts. No sooner than the lecture finished, the food competition started. Our dishes were very popular among the participants. These 100 makisushi was gone within 40minutes. So we served snacks till the event ended. There were team Syria next to our table. I talked with one girl from Syria. I would say she was very beautiful and looked like the same age as me. But actually she was still 14!! How mature she looked… foreigners basically look very younger than their appearance. Also I joined an African dance work shop. It was very exciting. In Africa, western social dance is regarded as vulgar and embarrassing. Man and woman do not touch with each other unlike western social dance. Man and woman dance one after the other. Man should dance to express their own power, showing their muscles. I really got interested in African dancing. Eventually, we Japanese team got a first prize at the competition and got some awards. It was going to be one of the good memories of my exchange. Representing Japan and explaining own culture with Japanese friends was a precious experience I thought. 

After that, I was asked to join some conversation event by an acquaintance. The conversation was generally about LGBT and racism. These two issues are the themes which I did not have chances to discuss in Japan. But there are big discussion going on in the Europe. In the future, with the development of globalization and increase of immigrants, Japan will face the same problems. I agree with LGBT promoting policies. We will learn about the commercial surrogacy in the children’s rights class. Because of globalization and technical advances, international commercial surrogacy is made possible. There are still many problems concerning about child’s rights, but in the near future it would become common thing. If so, the way of couples will change naturally.