Spring Celebrations
Spring has long been my favorite season. It's neither too hot, nor too cold. The flowers are blooming, the warblers are chirping, and the trees are green again (or white, or pink!). More importantly, spring seems to be full of celebrations.
No1: Eastern European Easter, Bulgarian-Ukrainian style
May 5th this year was the Orthodox Christian Easter (the date changes every year), and Bulgarians celebrate it by painting hard-boiled eggs, eating kozunak (Easter bread with raisins), and then engaging in "the egg battle." Egg battles are my favorite: you hold your egg and then let someone else smash their egg onto yours. Whichever egg's shell remains intact by the end of the "battle" is the winner.
I was afraid that my Easter this year would be lonely and eggless, but my friends Mimi (she's a senior from Bulgaria), Clay, and Polly (another senior from Ukraine) had organized an Eastern European Easter at their apartment. They had bought food paint (to paint the eggs) and had baked Ukrainian paska (which was similar enough to our kozunak), and we played Bulgarian and Ukrainian music. Turned out to be quite a fun Easter.
No2: Africa Week and the Dartmouth African Student Association's Mock Wedding
May 6th to May 11th was this year's Africa Week. Organized by the Dartmouth African Student Association (DASA) and the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, Africa Week was a series of events that highlighted the cultural diversity across Africa–as brought to Dartmouth by international and domestic students. The week ended with a "mock wedding celebrating a diversity of vibrant East and West African traditions" (you can find a more formal article about it here).
The fake wedding was the Africa Week event I attended. There was food, live music, a bride and a groom, and loads of people dressed in pretty dresses/suits. My friend Deborah, who invited me to the event, was part of the dance group that performed on stage. I personally never got to be on stage, but my shoe, bracelet and earring were. To end the night, DASA had organized a game where eight bridesmaids were sitting in chairs on the stage. The event's speaker then said today several times, "Okay, bring me a… [and here, she said something like: a shoe, or an earring, or a bracelet]." The bridesmaids promptly jumped off the stage and ran around, looking for an object to bring back to the stage as fast as they could. Whoever returned last was no longer part of the game. And that's how my shoe, earring and bracelet ended up on stage.
No3: Green Key
There's of course the famous Green Key weekend–a weekend with live music and a lot of fun. It doesn't make sense to write a blog post about spring celebrations without mentioning Green Key, but I think Green Key's popular enough that other writers will mention it, so that's it from me. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to head outside and celebrate my favorite season ;)