Random pictures

I had to clean off my digital camera, so here's a nice selection. The dancer pictures are from the "Festival of Hearts" featuring traditional Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, French, Serbian, Turkish and Roma dances, which took place on July 7th. It was wonderful! I particularly liked the Bulgarian dancers. I was sure I took more pictures, but I can't seem to find them.

We all wanted to see the Roma dancers, but of course, they were on last (at almost 1:00 am!).

After the individual dance performances (all in "traditional" costumes, traditional being in quotation marks because they were rented), I saw the dancers milling around. I was surprised to realise that the dancers were just local kids. The guys all spiked up their hair in the meantime and the girls praced around in tight tanktops and lowrise jeans.

I would love to see some of the "tough" kids at home learn to dance Romanian dances in costume. I'm so jealous Romania has so much culture compared to Canada.

A lot of us still had London on our minds. During the crepe dinner, none of us could tear our eyes away from the screen. I was half hysterical because my good friend Jon lives in London (among other friends) and my SMSed wouldn't go through (although Orange still charged me for each attempt). Since I was eating with a French, a Belgian and his Romanian partner, French was the lingua franca of the evening and the French stations weren't broadcasting anything. The Romanian stations were doing a door job of the coverage, so we turned to Euronews and CNN with me doing blow-by-blow translations into French.

Jon was safe in Britol, so I was relieved. But my thoughts were and still are with the people of Britain.