World's Fair

HyoJin "Chris" Rho
9th Grade,
Stevenson High School

Stevenson High School held an event called World's Fair on its campus from January 22-23, each day's activities starting at ten in the morning and endin at four in the afternoon. The purpose of the event was to give every student an experience of what it would be like to live in another nation's culture. Each country had a booth set up for students to approach and look at the respective culture's food, clothing, and much more. There were new amazing food, interesting facts, and other cool information for every country that participated in the World's Fair.

Additionally, the World's Fair ended with a show that presented the cultural dance of each country represented.
At the event's beginning, I worked the math booth, showing with others that math is the “universal language.” To make the booth a little more exciting and enjoyable, we sold pies and offered fun math games.

Meanwhile, the Indian booth sold Indian food and exhibited posters describing life in the subcontinent. Then, there was the Colombian booth, where Colombian kids wore their traditional festival clothing and were selling items from Colombia and showing a little bit of their dance. The French booth featured a girl enthusiastically suggesting people try a chocolate fondue dip. Her excitement showed how much she was enjoying the event, the thrill she experienced sharing her country's qualities with others.

After my shift at the math booth, I went booth to booth and tried many new delicious foods. I went from sampling chocolate coconut cakes from South Africa to chicken wrap in a hard tortilla from Spain. Of course, there was also a Korean booth that sold kim-bap, chicken, and kimchi. There were so many types of food that I was only able to eat about half of the options. Some were so popular that they sold out after about two hours.

After the booth session(first part of the day), everyone went to the Performing Arts Center, where each country hosted its own cultural dance or song. The performances showed how hard participants worked to show their culture, and it was an amazing time watching these performances. Especially exciting was seeing some of my friends from school among the performers. After this experiment of “World's Fair” for the first time, the joy of seeing and trying many new things, I have no doubt that I will go back to World's Fair next year.