Minority Park, Lunch, and Rush Hour

On Friday, I had the opportunity to go to a place the foreigners here call "Minority Park".  It is very much a tourist attraction.  And, it is safe to say I was the only American there.  It's sort of like an outdoor museum.  There you can walk around and learn about the 26 different minority groups of this region of East Asia.  There are 26 stops where you can see each group's type of house, how they lived, what they ate, the clothes they wore, and their individual beliefs and traditions.  I took lots of pictures, so I will only be able to show you a few.

This is an example of a Buddhist shrine.  An entire room of the home was dedicated to this specific purpose.

This lady was making one of minority group's traditional type of food.  I tried it with chop sticks and everything.  It is a type of cake / dough.  She was making some with brown sugar inside and some with sweet meat.

The building in the background is one of the traditional houses.  There was another lady inside making potato pancakes.

This is one example of the traditional dress for men, complete with some type of instrument.

This was the outside of the restaurant where we ate lunch.

This is what most of the place settings in restaurants here look like.  Everything comes packaged in plastic, and you have to unwrap it.

The dish on the left is potatoes with red and green bell pepper and mint.  Yes, mint.  I'm not a big fan of mint with my potatoes.  :)  On the right, this is fish with pepper and other spices.

This is Marcy.  She invited me along for the day.  She is a Brazilian friend, who studies language and was interested in learning more about the different dialects of some of the  minority groups.  She had just opened a piece of bamboo.  Inside, you can see the rice we were eating.  It was sticky rice with peanuts.

This was a show we were able to catch toward the end of the day.  There is a lady dressed to represent each of the 26 groups.  

By the end of the day, we were very tired.  Unfortunately, we chose to leave around 5:30 in the evening.  We didn't realize we would hit rush hour traffic.  After a long bus ride and two taxis, we finally made it.  The first taxi driver said he knew where to go, but he took us to the wrong complex.  Once we got to the right complex, we got turned around and it took a while to find the right building.  After two hours, we finally arrived.