26 July 2019
Cultural Celebration Day
For everyone who read my previous article, I won’t bore you with the same morning routine details and will start from the time we started preparing for our cultural celebration day.
For those of you who did not read my previous post, do go and read it.
Okay, let’s talk about food first, cuz you know, who doesn’t love food? So our Pakistani menu consisted of Biryani, Suji ka Halwa, Cholay and Puri. I’ll tell you what they are individually.
So biryani is perhaps the most popular dish in Pakistan, being a lunch or dinner dish prepared on normal days and mostly when guests are visiting. It’s actually the most liked dish in the country and no matter where you go in Pakistan, you can find biryani everywhere, like every 5 minutes you’ll see someone serving biryani. It’s rice mixed with chicken and spices.
The halwa, puri and cholay are a traditional breakfast combination in Pakistan. Puri is a deep fried special kind of press where halwa is a sweet dish and cholay are chickpeas cooked with spices and gravy. All these can be eaten separately as well but are mostly found in a combo.
The people who came to camp were so in love with our food they asked us if we could cook the food for them again😂
Now, let’s talk clothes. So since Pakistan has 5 provinces (states), each province has it’s own clothing, food and language but shalwar qameez is generally common in all the clothes. Punjabis are typically found with a turban on their head while Sindhis are found with a Sindhi topi(cap) on their heads and a long scarf like cloth around their necks called ajrak. People from Kashmir are typically found with a coat over their qameez.
Meeting people from other cultures, eating their food, looking at their clothes was an amazing experience. One particular guy from Denmark was actually so interested in Pakistani history and government that I sat and talked with him for like 45 whole minutes!
Getting to know new things about people was amazing. For example, the Swedish told us they had a midsummer dance on the lightest day of the year as an offering to the gods to make their crops fertile.
The Japanese were writing people’s names in Japanese. I got to know that the Japanese language actually has 3 different scripts and alphabets.
Lastly the unity show at night, to show that despite there being so much diversity in our cultures and differences in our traditions we are still scouts and we stand united as one and that we should celebrate those differences. The stadium was packed with people,
And the show aimed for us to honor our ancestors and the spirits by uniting as one!
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