Year of the Snake celebrations at the Oriental Museum

A blog post about the Oriental Museum‘s Lantern Festival by visitor, Freddie, age 11.

These are the five things I enjoyed the most:

1) Lantern Festival Gallery Trail

The trail led us from the bottom of the museum to the top. We had to find little toy snakes in the displays and find out more information about the year of the snake.

2) Chinese snacks

Chinese snacks were served in one of the Egyptian areas where you could pick two snacks of your choice and have a lychee juice – I’d not tried lychee juice before and I really liked it!

3) Calligraphy

There was a whole room dedicated to doing calligraphy with real Chinese ink and brushes! There were lots of different Chinese characters to try. One had a step-by-step guide and others were harder. There were two different types of paper. We had lots of fun doing this!

4) Games

There was a games room with people two teach two games – Go and Majong – I enjoyed learning them very much and we brought home our very own ‘Go’ game to keep practising.

5) Lion Dance and Dragon Dance

This was my favourite part!

In the lion dance two adults were dressed as a lion and they paraded around throwing lettuce (which brings good luck!). Drums were playing and it was really exciting.

Straight after that was the dragon dance. All the children got to have a go of holding and waving the big dragon or playing an instrument while parading around the Oriental Museum.