Favorite Carnival moments

Carnivals are the best time of the year!! Everyone loves carnival!! That’s what people use to say, I would like to believe it but I just can’t, is not that I hate it, I just didn’t born with those “genes”. However, there were three things that I truly enjoyed these carnivals: 

1) To see how happy people was, is very nice to see how different people ,who don’t even know each other, are so cheerful, they sing, dance and make new friends. When I saw this, I thought about other cultures, was funny to think what would an Asian do if somebody suddenly dance to him/her one of those weird “reguetón” songs jajajaja, probably he/she would be as stunned as I was(True story).

2)Traditional music is great!, even when my favorite genre is Rock, I found traditional music very beautiful and creative. I think is amazing the way how these songs can transmit feelings and histories without lyrics.

3) The last and most important thing, the thing that I love the most about this carnival was TO SLEEP!! There’s no better feeling than go to bed without alarms or homework. Geez, I don’t care if there have to be one thousand carnivals in the year, or if I don´t know how to dance, or if I hate “reguetón”, who cares? If I can sleep all day long, for me is totally perfect. Certainly, the hours I sleep, were my favorite carnival moments :).

This is one of the very very very few pictures of me in carnival events; my mom took it 12 years ago, I guess you can figure out from my face that “gene” stuff…

Tinariwen

1. What do we learn about Tuareg culture from this video?

In this video we can see a man practicing a tea ceremony, in my opinion, rituals are one of the most distinctive and beautiful parts of every culture. Each place has his own way to see the world and this kind of events allows people to represent, any kind of feeling. We could see that the objects the man used are crafted and the tea is heated with brushwood. This seems to be an ancient tradition, based in their nomad predecessors, in which people meet to drink tea and talk about their lives.

2. Keeping in mind what you learned from this interview, how does seeing the visuals within the video and knowing the meaning of the lyrics give us a deeper understanding of Tuareg culture?

The visuals are very helpful, because they allow us to see the entire ritual and, with the lyrics we can figure out the reasons why this tea ceremony is done . We can see the way the singers are dressed and the instruments and objects they use, also the expressions of people in the video give us an idea about the kind of songs and the message they want to transmit.

Barranquilla- 2013 Cultural Capital

1. Why was Barranquilla chosen?

The city was chosen for the hard work of Barranquilla’s mayoralty; they postulate Barranquilla for cultural capital and started the process with the International Bureau of Cultural Capitals. When the president of that entity was in Atlántico’s capital he was impressed of the positivism, the cultural cohesion, and the international projection of the city.

2. Will Barranquilla receive any of the economic benefits Liverpool hoped to from being named a cultural capital?

The benefits are the same for both, as Liverpool, Barranquilla will have lots of international promotion and this can be very convenient for the tourism. The economic benefits that the city can receive depend on the way the city takes advantage of this opportunity.