Water Festival

Burmese Traditional Water Festival in USA

I am so excited to write about the experience essay. This is interesting because we are not going to write about the experience that we have already had, but an experience that we have never had before. So I am choosing to write about the Burmese Traditional Water Festival in USA. They also name this water festival as Thingyan.

I went to a water festival in Tennessee with my family on April 29. We also have friends who are Burmese that live there. We slept at their house for two days. They also told me how they celebrated their water festival in Burma. Back in Burma, this traditional celebration takes place in April for four days in the heat of the Burmese summer. This celebration means every year people have to clean and wash their bad habits by Thingyan water. All adults go to a temple to worship on these days. They build the stages for dancers and water players on the street. On the stage, people spray water with small hoses onto other people who come through with cars, bikes and motorcycles. They celebrate in other ways such as by singing water festival songs and eating traditional food, as well as cleaning and donating food (including meat) on these days.

Before I was going there, I hope to learn many new things. I wanted to know how they celebrate the water festival. If they had a dance, how they dance and what costumes they wear when they were dancing. I was hoping to learn the difference between their traditional food, dances, costumes and my traditional food, dance, and costumes. In the USA, they just celebrate two days for the water festival. They also don’t celebrate at the same time as Burma because of the weather in USA. They celebrated the water festival at the park. They also built at the stages for the dancers. The dancers wore their traditional costumes while dancing and, they also sang the traditional songs. They looked so lovely in their Thingyan costumes and, some of my friends danced there even...