Festivals

When I was invited to travel around the region of Basilicata, my first thought was, “Where’s Basilicata?” Even upon arriving at the airport in Bari, only a two-hour flight from London, I didn’t really know where I was or what to expect.

And while I’d visited Italy three times before, and seen most of the major cities, I didn’t expect to feel so immediately comfortable and welcome in the region. Each day, action-packed with cooking lessons and sailing and zip-lining and festival-going and eating and drinking (and eating and drinking some more), made me fall more and more in love with the region and its people.

“What’s a Beaver Tail?”

All eyes looked to me for the answer. We stood beside a huge ice sculpture; it was one of many at the Festival du Voyageur, a ten-day celebration of Canada’s fur-trading past and of Winnipeg’s French community. I had gone almost every year as a child, but this was the first time I’d been in Winnipeg in February for a long time. The temperature registered a frigid -31 degrees Celsius, and that was without windchill. My hometown is infamous for being one of the coldest cities in the world, often challenging its residents with a solid few weeks of -40 and below every January and February. We are hearty folk, us Winnipeggers, and we’re damn proud of it. There’s something about the cold that invigorates us, that makes us push out our chests and breathe in deep, as if to prove that we can take it.

I went to Burning Man in 2011, and stayed the full eight days. I camped in the desert under the big clear sky, my days spent riding the playa on my bicycle, making friends, cooking grilled cheese sandwiches, my nights a hazy blur of stilt-walkers, fire-breathers, mutant cars shaped like scorpions and jellyfish. I wore outfits I threw together from a garbage bag of costumes in the trunk; I wore saris and glitter, fake fur and angel wings, tutus and sometimes nothing at all. When I first reached the gates on that very first day, a girl wearing pink fishnets made me roll around in the playa, coating my hair in the greyish dust. “Welcome home,” she told me, and hugged me. I was instantly in love with this alternate universe, this utopian dream of creativity and art and acceptance.

Chiang Mai, Thailand Just a few of the many videos I took during the Songkran Festival this week. All I can say is, that waterproof camera was one of the best investments…

Sanja Matsuri, Tokyo, Japan Japan’s summer festivals are in full swing again, and I couldn’t be happier.