Mini-NJGSS reunion: Lusofonia Festival

After a rather tedious day at UM proctoring the ACT and the EELC101 midterm exam, it was good to meet up in Senado with a very old friend: Tatiana, one of my suitemates from NJGSS back in 2004. She's spending a year in HK as part of the Princeton in Asia program, working for the Far East Economic Review until December, then switching to the Wall Street Journal. Since she speaks Cantonese, she had been touring some of the central Macau area with a Lonely Planet guidebook while I was at work, but for dinner we headed down to Old Taipa Village, where the Lusofonia Festival was in full swing.

One of the entrance archways to the "Festa de Lusofonia"

For those of you who are wondering, "Lusophone" means Portuguese-speaking, similar to how Anglophone means English-speaking. (It took us a while to figure this out...yay for Wikipedia!) Lusophone countries don't just include Portugal and Brazil, but also many smaller places like Macau, East Timor, Cabo Verde, and other former Portuguese colonies. Thus, this festival was a celebration of all these countries' varying cultures, with food vendors, craft booths, and various performances.

Is this supposed to be a volcano?

It was a bit strange to see Asian people in Portuguese costumes, but then they also danced later!

Whirling around on stage

The Brasilian booth, which had this amazing chocolate mousse truffle thingy

After that, we tried to catch the Dragon's Treasure show at City of Dreams, but the last showtime had been changed to 10:30 PM instead of midnight, so we just missed it. Instead, we just chatted for a while over frozen margaritas at the Venetian, then walked around the canals (which Tatiana found highly amusing). It was good to catch up on news of other NJGSS-ers and realize that even though most of us haven't kept in touch since 2004 (or 2005 at best), there's still an underlying bond =)

Susan and Sam left for Vietnam at a ridiculously early time this morning (their plane was 7:50 AM), so I dropped Tatiana off at Lou Lim Ieoc garden with instructions on which bus would take her back to the ferry terminal once she was done exploring, then headed off to church/dance class. I'll see her again tomorrow night, when I head to HK for some shoe-shopping (my black flats fell apart and my sneakers have holes in the toes!) and maybe a surprise for Mom ;-)