Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404100043
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
"We try, but here it is difficult to find a very French coffee," a woman with a strong French accent replies.
In Blacksburg on Saturday, it may have been hard to find genuine java, but the flavor was definitely foreign with a dash of the melting pot during the annual International Fest street fair downtown.
"Try some vegemite!" calls the Australian contingent, with a folding table, a flag, a worn football and a loaf of generic white bread spread with vegemite.
The bread sits on a broken plate on the tape player, which plays an aborigine band. What is vegemite? Yeast extract with vitamin B. The students watch you closely as you eat. It tastes like solid soy sauce.
"We watch their expression, and they're always horrified," explains Steve Wroe, a student from Melbourne, Australia. Does Wroe like it? He grins impishly, his dimples deepening beneath a weekend's worth of stubble. "I love it. The best hangover cure there is. That is the hangover cure from hell."
The Australians may be needing it, as Wroe says the idea for the table "got designed at two o'clock in the morning in an extremely drunk stupor."
Next door is the more serious Environmental Literacy Network, which through E-mail with the Blacksburg Electronic Village hopes to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue.
"Which, unfortunately, you don't get a lot of at the university," says Michael O'Brien, president of the academic, apolitical group.
Friends of Palestine doesn't skirt its political tone. One poster adapts Rabbi Hillel's proverb: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If not this way, how? If not now, when?"
A Palestinian student who grew up in Kuwait says, "We feel the media here is strongly influenced by the Jewish lobby. We feel people here just see one side." He declines to give his name, because he hopes to return to the occupied territories, and does not want Israeli monitors to see his name in the American press.
Spanish, French, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Japanese and Korean flags - among others - fly behind and across the tables.
A little girl hears the Colombians talking to each other beside their sign, "Colombia. So much more than cocaine." She asks her mom in Spanish if they're speaking espanol.
Folks switch languages as easily as switching tenses. "Comment ca va?" the woman at the French table asks a visitor. Then she turns to a small child with a passport, and stamps a lipstick kiss on it. "It's a big kiss from France," she explains.
Across the way at the Indian table, a woman in a purple sari and a fire-engine red baseball cap dishes out food. At the Taiwanese table, jeans flash underneath the traditional costume.
Argentina's table reminds browsers that the United States is not the only immigrant culture. The factoids say that a third of Argentines have Italian ancestry, and that Argentina has the fourth-largest Jewish population.
At the Indian table, "the great swamis" sit cross-legged on the ground, their Nikes under them. Mehul Sanghani, a Tech freshman with braces, reads palms. "Watch out for, like, a car accident or something later on in life," he tells a woman. She cries, "Argh!" Her friend says, "Biking! Get a ride!"
Sanghani examines another hand intently. It has a broken lifeline. "That either means you're going to have a very good afterlife, or you're going to have a second chance at life," he tells Tech student Scott Whitman.
"You meet all your educational goals," the swami says. "It does get kind of jagged in the middle."
Whitman has changed majors and schools and taken a year off from school.
Sanghani learned palm reading when his grandparents, who still live in India, came for extended visits.
The all-ages and all-ethnicities crowd also mixes locomotion - walkers move for inline skates, strollers, wagons, wheelchairs and bicycles.
A man walking down College Avenue plays Yankee Doodle on an Asian-looking recorder covered with brightly colored cloths and cords. His friend says, "Muy bien."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***