Novosibirsk State University InterWeek Festival Gathers Students from 14 Countries

This international event has been taken place at the university since 1966.

InterWeek, an annual forum on NSU campus featured an international tent camp with community activists wearing national costumes and presenting customs and traditions of their countries. 

In 2017, the festival brought together students from the USA, South Korea, China, Japan, Israel, France, Spain, Italy, Kyrgyzstan and other countries.

Festival guests were welcome to take part in master classes and contests with the winners receiving prizes and treat. Chinese students showed how to tie a special Chinese knot and read hieroglyphs, and invited everybody to help themselves to wontons (dumplings) and green tea. 

To learn more about Italy, InterWeek guests were offered to piece together an Appenine Peninsula map and match Italian pastas’ names to pictures.  Kyrgyz students offered their peers to try their hand in the ‘alchiki’ game, a counterpart to knucklebones, and taste beshbarmak (boiled mutton with noodles), chak-chak (fried cake drenched in honey) and kumis (mare milk).

The French tent guests had to identify French painters and writers by photos and read tongue twisters in French as fast as they could.  In the German tent, those who could guess the meaning of German words were treated to Vienna waffles, pretzels and punsch. 

Countries’ customs were presented with background national songs and dances performed by international student teams.