You mean to say that going to a Korean Festival is not on your bucket list? Then my bucket list (if I had one) definitely kicks your bucket list’s ass.
The best thing about going to a Korean Festival is a lot of Koreans, they are nice and friendly people who don’t mind a freeloader who showed up as a friend of a friend of a guest.
Any self-respecting Korean Festival starts off by singing Korean National Anthem followed the US National Anthem.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXIJKyuU1d4
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdki1LhKT5k
Korean War Veterans get a lot of respect at the event.
You’d think that reading Korean is hard…
…but you’d be wrong, I immediately knew what the 3rd prize was.
Another great thing about Korean Festivals is a combination of soccer, tennis and volleyball they play there.
For the entertainment Koreans enjoy making fun of the non-Koreans pretending to do martial arts.
I thought something was strange when whatever the martial arts people were screaming sounded a lot like “Jesus First” but then they proceeded to create cross formation and re-enact the Passion of the Christ.
This is the part after they crucified their instructor a.k.a. Jesus…
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxnZAqZ97BI
…so he can return from the dead.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5aAhsfRSl0
Of course no one leaves hungry.
To recap: nice people, a show about Jesus and martial arts, good food and lots and lots of soap.
On a crisp November morning the only sound in the historic downtown Coffeyville, KS was the uncontrollable laughter of two people sitting in a small car in front of a mural hanging on a brick wall. Two people have been doing this for some time, and when one of them would stop laughing, the other pointed to the mural again and both would start giggling again, feverishly wiping away streaming tears. Two people were not strangers to the small town folk art but just like visitors to the Sistine Chapel they knew this could never be surpassed.
The Holocaust Remembrance day falls on May 2 this year and in the few following posts I will publish several documents concerning the treatment of the Jewish population in my hometown of Odessa, Ukraine issued by the Romanian Authority which occupied Odessa from 1941-1944.
At the beginning of the occupation there were 80,000-90,000 Jews who did not evacuate from Odessa. When the city was liberated on April 10, 1944 there were reportedly only 600 left. Somewhere in the Odessa Region my 6-year old Father survived in the ghetto with help from kind people and lots of luck. The area where he lived with my Grandmother was occupied by the Italians who were not very enthusiastic about being in the war and their relative reluctance to torture and execute the Jews might have resulted in more survivors than in the areas controlled by Romanians who proved themselves to be ruthless murderers.
Many places in Odessa and the Region have memorial markers where the executions were conducted, such as a place where over 25,000 Jews were burned alive shortly after the occupation started. Unfortunately, I never stopped or paid attention to them, probably like most people. I saw more memorial markers today, while researching this post, than I remember seeing when I still lived in Odessa.
The Russian text is found in the National Archives of the Odessa Region, translation mine. If I have time and patience I will also try to translate a personal memoir written by a survivor; translation is a long and tedious process, and even though I start with a machine translation, it still doesn’t always come out right. Feel free to let me know if I can correct some grammar or spelling errors.
