Identifying Flags from nevruz Countries in Toronto, 2015 - torontomulticulturalcalendar.com

CMCC and Friends participated in the Nevruz Spring festival in Toronto on April 5th and were revisited by Ruth Lor Malloy, who is a devoted enthusiast of all things multicultural. She attended our Art Exhibition in September as well and had much things to say.

Ruth writes: I especially wanted to go to one of my favourites, the Nevruz Spring Festival at the Nile Academy. This festival is great because it has representatives from many different countries, all in one place. It was a chance to add to my collection of photos of the different cultures that we have in Toronto. I expected them all to be Turkic speaking.

I had challenged my Blog readers to identify the 17 flags in the Nevruz poster. (See Blog 450 at torontomulticulturalcalendar.com.) This was mainly because I couldn’t identify them myself. I decided to concentrate on the flags at this fair. The set-up at the different tables was ideal. Each of the cultures or countries had a flag on the wall behind its collection of symbols, arts and crafts. Some had sample food, either free or for sale.

Copyright ©2015 Ruth Lor Malloy

The first country table visited was Mongolia. A student and a representative of the Canada-Mongolia Chamber of Commerce were there. I remembered Mongolia as a Buddhist country. What was it doing at a primarily Muslim festival? Uighurs live in the far west of Mongolia, they said. Uighurs are Muslim and Turkic speaking. I should have remembered them and the Kazaks. The Mongolians were showing a Mongolian flag, not a Uighur or Kazak flag. And Genghis Khan was there.

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About Ruth Lor Malloy
She is behind TorontoMulticulturalCalendar.com. She is a travel writer and photographer, born in Canada with an obsession to experience the whole world.  She was brought up in a Chinese restaurant family in eastern Ontario, and has lived for extended periods in the U.S., the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, India, Taiwan, and Thailand. She has also lived in Japan,  Mexico and Brasil.  From 1975 to 2002, she published a series of 14 guide books on China. She has also published guide books on Beijing and Hong Kong, and helped with one on Almaty.   Her self-guided, downloadable photo tours on the Calgary Stampede, the Quebec Winter Carnival, The World in Toronto, and Toronto’s Many Chinatowns are available from VisualTravelTours.com.  This company has also published her tours on Botswana, Mongolia and Helsinki.

Ruth’s travel articles have appeared in publications like the Asian Wall St. Journal, Copley News Service, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, and Globe and Mail. Her aim is to bring people of different backgrounds together as friends with an appreciation of each others’ cultures. She believes one of the ways this can be done in Toronto is to encourage visits to each other’s festivals.  Her calendar lists free or nearly free events that provide such opportunities.

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