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Foreigners experience a special Dragon Boat Festival in Jinan

2019/6/11 17:33:26   source:sdchina.com

As one of the traditional Chinese festivals, the Dragon Boat Festival contains profound cultural connotation. Recently, over 20 foreigners from the U.S., France, Thailand and the Republic of Congo joined in the activity organized by “Touch Shandong” column of sdchina.com to get a better understanding of this traditional festival and Chinese culture. The activity includes two games, which are the land dragon boat race and zongzi grabbing race. At the beginning, participants formed different teams randomly on site and have a heated discussion on the name of teams, which were finally determined as "Borderless Jinan Uiversity", "Dragon Team", "Winner Team" and "Lucky Team". Each team painted a team flag, created a cheer slogan and shouted it out to cheer.

The dragon boat race is not the traditional kind, but an inflatable land dragon boat, which requires the cooperation of all team members. Bindika Julphane, from the Republic of Congo acted as a translator during the whole event because of his high-level oral Chinese proficiency. He was also the captain of the team “Boundless Jinan University”. Bindika said that he had a deeper understanding of the cultural connotation of the Dragon Boat Festival. “Although our team didn’t win in the land dragon boat race, I’m still very happy to enjoy this teamwork process,” he added.

In the game of grabbing zongzi, one team member must lean the body out and take as many zongzi as he/she can without exceeding the marked line. Each team racked their brains to use the shortest time to take as many zongzi as they can.

After the event, team members tasted the most representative food of the Dragon Boat Festival -zongzi. An American student who came to China for a short-time studying said that it was his first time to eat this kind of Chinese food and it was a great honor to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival during his stay in China.

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