Verbal Snippets & Snapshots

This past weekend was busy, because (a) it was Family Weekend; (b) the Engineering and Natural Sciences Open House was on Saturday, October 21; and (c) Filipino Cultural Night was yesterday (i.e., Sunday, October 22).

My family arrived sometime on late Friday afternoon, and I spent most of my afternoon and evening with them. On Saturday morning, I started assisting with the Engineering and Natural Sciences Open House around 8:00. Around 10:00, there wasn’t much to do, so I spent time with my family and my friend Megan, who was visiting campus for the open house. In the afternoon, I joined five other Hopkins students at a student life panel. Four of us–JHU_Julia, JHU_Roxi, JHU_Tanmay, and I–were proudly representing SAAB there and plugging Hopkins Interactive in some of our responses. Following my open house involvement, I rejoined my family, and I spent the rest of my afternoon and evening with them.

After my family left to go home early yesterday afternoon, I spent the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening doing FSA-related activities. Following my family’s departure, I joined some freshmen from the Filipino Students Association (FSA) in frying Filipino food at the common kitchen of Building A, which is one of the freshman dorms; we prepared (1) siakoy, which are small braids of fried dough covered with sugar, (2) karioka, which are fried balls made of rice flour, sesame seeds, and coconut and served with a caramelized sugar sauce, and (3) lumpia, which are egg rolls. After cooking, we all headed with the fried goodies to the Glass Pavilion (a.k.a. “Glass Pav”), where the FSA upperclassmen were setting up for the event. In addition to what we freshmen cooked, some of the upperclassmen also prepared Filipino food, but the biggest culinary boost came from a caterer who made several dishes. There’s a picture here with a pretty good view of most of the food available, and you can see some of us from FSA serving it. All that food was gone before the entertainment aspect of the evening even started!

Here’s how the evening went: first, we FSA members met at the Glass Pav, where we set up and practiced tinikling. Tinikling is a traditional rural folk dance in which people dance between two bamboo poles clapped together; it’s supposed to be an imitation of the tikling bird moving among tree branches and grass stems. Shortly after the doors opened, we started to serve food, and by the time the program itself had begun, there was no more food left. The emcees of the evening were Chesca and JoJo, seniors in FSA. They introduced vocal performances by Gina, a sophomore in FSA, and piano performances of music by Filipino classical composers by Reynaldo Reyes, a music professor at Towson University and a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory of the Peabody Institute. At the end of the evening, we performed tinikling. While we didn’t dance like professionals, we did pretty well.  You can watch a YouTube video of it below. By the way, not everyone who danced in the tinikling routine is in the video, including yours truly.

Following tinikling, people left, since that was the end of the event, and we FSA members cleaned up–but not before posing for group pictures! Here’s one with most of us. By the way, you don’t have to be Filipino to be in FSA. For that matter, you don’t have to be of a certain race or ethnicity to join any of the cultural groups on campus!

N.B. Thanks to my friends Caroline and Clarisa–they’re freshmen in FSA–for allowing me to use the photos they took for Filipino Cultural Night.