Numerous activities take place at the Egremont Crab Fair, which has been held in England’s Lake District since 1267. One of them is the Gurning Festival, in which people compete to see who can pull the most hideous faces. Contestants place their face through a horse-collar and make the most awful faces they can. There are women’s and men’s events, and the competition is fierce!
Photo Source:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/41282197
Rusyn is an East Slavic language spoken by the Rusyn people in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, and written in the Cyrillic script. Rusyns live in several different countries, including Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania.
Rusyn is recognised as a minority language in most countries where it exists, but this sparked a linguistic controversy, as some linguists consider it a language and others a dialect of Ukrainian, with which it is largely mutually comprehensible, while others again consider it a variant of Russian.
One example among hundreds, if not thousands, of cases where the boundaries between dialects and languages are wafer-thin!
Photo Source: https://ie.pinterest.com/pin/336644140866057229/
The annual cheese-rolling festival at Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester, England has been held since at least the early nineteenth century but possibly dates back six hundred years or more. Competitors race down a hill chasing a wheel of Double Gloucester Cheese, a local delicacy. The first person to cross the finish line at the bottom of the hill wins the cheese.
Cheese-rolling might sound like a fairly benign pastime, but injuries are common. In 2023, six competitors were injured so badly they had to be transported to hospital by ambulance and a competitor in the woman’s event finished unconscious and only learned of her victory when she woke up under medical treatment!
Photo Source: https://www.mashed.com/889886/why-britains-cheese-rolling-contest-just-made-history/
Ever fancied joining a massive tomato fight in the streets of Spain?
La Tomatina is a festival celebrated in the small town of Buñol, Spain since the 1940s. Every year on the last Wednesday of August, it attracts thousands of participants who throw tomatoes at one another until everyone is wallowing in a red tide of tomato pulp.
Briefly banned by General Franco during the fascist period because of its lack of religious significance, La Tomatina is now a wildly popular event and tourist attraction, so successful that some other communities in tomato-producing regions around the world have started holding their own tomato-throwing festivities!
Olé!
Photo Source : https://www.travelturtle.world/blog/paint-it-red-at-la-tomatina-festival/