Friday at the IJK

The sun's back out.

Good day to wander down to the railway/bus station to find out about buses to Macedonia. Always a bit of a pain in the neck after the efficiency of Germany. Who know's what confusing info I'll get.

Well, the info turned out to be pretty straight-forward. Bus goes twice a week, Fridays and Tuesdays.

I'm not sure whether I should be surprised at the large number of smokers here at the IJK or expect it. Just part of the scene perhaps.

Language festival today. Esperantists from different countries and languages set up tables outside and presented their country and their language. Quite interesting but I'm a bit against these watered down presentations of languages. The Esperanto community probably sees this as a big affirmation of cultural diversity, but I see it more as similar to what happens in Australia - the diversity is supported but few learn any foreign language. Well, in retrospect there's probably more of the language presented here than in some school curricula in Australia. So perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh. It's still interesting and generates a huge amount of interest. In fact I think that a similar thing in Australia would also generate a lot of interest but in Australia this sort of event seems to be confined to food festivals.

Here's Finland's contribution to the language festival.

A flag and a Finnish beer. Maybe we can present something similar for Australia next year in Vietnam.

I'm not sure whether this was France or the Netherlands. In any case, both of them had one one of those funny bikes that you lie back on to ride.



Some were more successful at it than others. The bloke with the hat and beard next to the bike also did a great job representing France on guitar.

Japan created a lot of interest of course with girls clad in kimonos. Here I am having a samisen lesson.



The samisen player also had a foldup or inflatable keyboard. That also generated quite a bit of interest.



Korea's exhibit was a woman in hanbok and my friend here who was press-ganged into writing up a quick display of the alphabet.

All in all, the language display afternoon was one of the events of the IJK which generated the most interest. And it was all a lot of fun too. Congrats to the organisers.