European-American Night

The pictures are finally posted, now for the commentary. Every few months, IHE has a cultural night. Since there are less than a dozen Europeans, Europe has been combined with the Americas to form one night of dancing, eating, and drinking with some powerpoint presentations thrown in for good measure. We chose to use Carnival as a theme to tie the two continents together, since it's celebrated in one form or another in all of the participants home countries (even mine), and we were really in the mood since many of us were to be celebrating it the week before. But the theme was not liked by some religious leaders, saying it was sacrilege to celebrate Carnival during Lent, so during the presentations I had to add the disclaimer that this would be a representation of Carnival, not an actual Carnival celebration. I was the one announcing this, because Alejandro and I were the MC's for the evening.

A big part of the night was food. Since it was decided that it would be a bit offensive to explain the Mardi Gras "culture" of throwing beads to girls who responded to the call of, "Show us your tits!", I baked some chocolate chip cookies. 600 of them. I didn't actually bake them all, but managed a team who chopped the six pounds of chocolate into bite size pieces, formed balls of cookie dough that somehow managed to make it into people's mouths, and the all important quality control, which involved the disappearance of at least one cookie from every batch. The rest of the menu included Panamanian chicken and rice, fried plantains (Colombia), Spanish tortas, and apple strudel (Austria).

The presentations were excellent. The costumes and music and dancing were divine. I was really surprised by how many of my friends know traditional dances and reminisced about square dancing in 4th grade gym class when we still thought it was gross to hold the hands of the boys. To get in the Carnival spirit I figured a short skirt would be appropriate, but once the wig and makeup were applied, I ended up impersonating a New Orleans prostitute. It was a bit strange being on stage, since my only previous experience in the theatre had been being the man behind the curtain.

At first I was a bit frustrated by the lack of communication between the technicians and the stage, but after a shot of tequila and a cup of Colombian coffee, the show seemed to go quite well. Alejandro and I had to improvise a bit. Nobody laughed at my jokes, except the one American who was there, and Bin because he was laughing at everything. I don't think that they were even funny, actually one was, but I figured that someone would laugh out of pity at the rest. Fortunately, the painful part was over quite quickly and we sambaed our way to the cafeteria for drinking and dancing in the typical IHE fashion. If you are not sure what that means, look at the photos again, and review some in the previous albums.