Saturday

Yesterday, Sunshine's entire language department held class at the National Mall during the forty-first annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival,* partially dedicated to Mekong River cultures this year. Since she was meeting everyone a little bit later than her normal class schedule I decided to get up a little bit early and join them. Finally, yesterday morning, I met Sunshine's teachers. I also met a few of the students heading to Hanoi. Her southern dialect classmate, there's only the one now, I'd met already. The festival was great. At the tent dedicated to Thai silversmiths, there were dozens of delicate necklaces and bracelets, featuring polished jade in swirly silver floral settings. At the woodcarving tent, there was an insane ottoman-sized elephant carving with seamless looking, but nevertheless articulated, ears and tail. Intricate pathways deep in its wooden anatomy allowed it to occasionally pee into a hole in its base. Across the way, at the puppet tent, colorfully detailed two-dimensional warriors and animals, articulated by wooden posts, were available for people to handle between professional demonstrations. These were fashioned from stretched hide, and decorated with sequins and fabric and intricate cuts allowing backlighting to pinpoint here and there in the surface of otherwise dully translucent skins. At the weaving tent, beside displays of ochre, cochineal, cobalt and other raw materials used to dye silk, a woman operated a loom slowly enough for me to see what she was doing, but prestigiously enough for me to still be confused as to how she was doing it, even after ten minutes of standing a foot from her blurry hands. There was plenty more: traditional gong music and singing and lion dancing on stilts. I ate something new to me, too: coconut sticky rice with mango. Best food I’ve ever bought in a tent. [Cavin]