The International Festival

I have told many friends in the past week, that I will try to post a new blog story when the international festival at The Claremont Colleges is over. I guess this is a time to keep my promise.


This is my first time that I will participate in this festival, which will be held on Saturday 8th, 2006. Many people told me the story of this international festival that it is the most famous festival in town (the city of Claremont). Local people and also neighborhood will come by and enjoy this joy during the first week of California spring season.


Basically, the principal staff of this festival is the I-Place (or international office in general term), where we can utilize all facilities such as kitchen, place, frozen truck, and so on to run our thai booth.


I-Place lounge where we can watch cable TV and enjoy our time

A day before the festival begins, thai students were gather at the I-Place around 2 p.m. to prepare some thai tea, since we decided to buy ready-to-sell grilled chicken (ไก่ปิ้ง) and thai fish cake (ทอดมันปลา) to save our time in preparation. Only thai tea is our studentmade product (forget about vocabulary).


Our thai labors at The Claremont Colleges

During the preparing of thai tea, there was full of laughter because we are not trained to be a professional chef. We messed up the kitchen and spilled thai tea on the floor. We were supposed to follow the kitchen instructions of how to make a sanitary food, for example, we should wear a hairnet/hat and gloves to keep our food free from germ, but we failed to do so.

P’ Golf is seemed the most dependable guy, who we voluntarily assigned him to make thai tea (I’m not sure that he is voluntarily accept it or not but it does not matter). Eventually, we ended up with 4 big pots of thai tea that can serve hundreds of customers.


We are filtering tea leafs from thai tea

On the festival day, our booth, next to Australian student’s booth, is located at the beginning of the Claremont McKenna College lawn. We set the price $3/stick for grilled chicken, $1.5/glass for thai tea and $2/5 pieces of fish cake.


Our festival guests


Our thai booth


Our cooks



We took the photo at the end of the festival. Smell like a smoked chicken!

We made a total sale of $1,200 (by approximate) which the profit yields $600. It’s not that bad for us at all (remember we are not experienced cook). Our energy is exhausted. So tired man! Thank you for all of us.


School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University at night time.