Yilan International Children’s Folklore & Folkgames Festival - opening ceremony

We were given tickets to attend the opening ceremony of this years festival on July 4th. Not being able to read Chinese we thought it was just access to the water theme park, but we were pleasantly surprised that there were a number of folk dance performances to be held that evening too.

The representatives at this years event

There were performing artists from 6 countries and Taiwan, namely, Bolivia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Russia and Thailand. We thought it was only for children but a number of adult performers were also present.

The first performance was from the Taiwanese dancers and was very elegant.

Taiwanese Dancers

We took a video of the very elegant Taiwanese dancing, you can watch it below.

Another Taiwanese performance

Next came a performance from Thailand. The costumes were beautiful, but the music wasn't really to my taste.

A Thai dancer in what looked like a hummingbird costume

 

Then some singing and dancing from an Indonesian high school dance group.

Some kind of warrior costumes I think

There was also a performance by dancers from Hungary seen in the video below. 

They were really very good and the music was more kind to my ears.

The Russian dancers know how to smile!

For me they were really the best performance

They really had a lot of flair and energy

This performance was a lot of fun

These girls must be training to be ballet dancers

They even went and fetched members of the audience

Wonderful!

Harvesting rice

It was starting to appear that harvesting rice was an event completed by mice in the middle of the night when no one was watching. Each day as we rode to work or back more fields were harvested, but we hadn't seen a single harvester. Then a few days ago we saw one and then two and then more. The rice is now being harvested furiously, many fields are bare, and what's great is that we managed to get some pictures of this fleeting, shy animal called a rice combine harvester.

One of the harvesters roaming around Luodong at the moment

Why is it called a combine harvester? Because it combines the three traditional stages of grain harvesting, reaping, threshing and winnowing into one step, saving a lot of time, and allowing farmers to spend more time drinking beer or eating stinky tofu at the local night market.

It's such a neat process, it doesn't even hurt too many of the rice plants. It's tracks are narrower than the distance between two rows of rice plants (planted by a rice planting machine).

The only damage it makes to the field is on either end where it turns. It has a limited storage capacity so after two trips up and down the paddy it must stop and offload.

Offloading the rice

It's an amazingly quick little machine. It looked like it took 15 minutes to harvest a really large rice paddy. It was going at an impressive pace.