Emerging from the metro station in a haze of national mall dust and heat, I immediately didn't want to be at the folk life festival.  I've gone every year since I've been in DC and it's something I always feel like I should do - you know, get some culture.  

Unfortunately, the experience of the folk life festival on a hot sunday in july could leave the most intrepid cultural explorer (which I'm not), a little disgruntled.  With the long lines for food and the endless horizon of tents as one surveys the mall, it feels overwhelming.  Not to mention, if you're like, me, swarms of meandering tourists make you want to jump into the tidal basin.  

So I stayed about 20 minutes, listlessly wandering around the Mekong exhibit, where I saw basket weaving, canoe digging, silversmithing, and lots of people eating what looked like pad thai.  Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the tourists, but I couldn't take it.  I realized I'm not that interested in watching people exercise their cultural traditions, unless those traditions are music, dance, or literature (they have those there, I just couldn't get a seat).  I'd probably be much more enthralled by basket weaving if it weren't hot out and if I weren't pressed up against a sweaty stranger to try to see it.

Complaining aside - what little research I did on the history of the folklife festival made me curious to go back (when it's raining and no one is around except me and the basketweavers).  

"The Festival has strong impacts on policies, scholarship, and folks "back home." Many states and several nations have remounted Festival programs locally and used them to generate laws, institutions, educational programs, books, documentary films, recordings, museum and traveling exhibitions. In many cases, the Festival has energized local and regional tradition bearers and their communities, and thus helped to conserve and create cultural resources. Festival practice served as both the backdrop and inspiration for the consideration and ultimately the development of UNESCO's 2003 International Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage."

So I'm going to go back - this sounds worthy.  And I'll even promise to write an updated blog about it - to force myself to go.  This time, I'll bring a huge bottle of water, sunscreen, sunglasses, and some sort of cattle prod to deal with the tourists.  

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