Embassy Festival- Lifting Global Culture’ is an annual event in The Hague which gathers more than 50,000 visitors. This year the day long festival held on 1 September 2018, Bangladesh Embassy was one of the 62 participating embassies. Embassy festival is a platform, where participating countries present their cultural heritage, traditional products and authentic cuisine. Participating Embassies join the festival with full enthusiasm and the visitors wait for the whole year to visit this festival. The yearlong publicity and preparations of the organizers and The Hague Municipality ensures remarkable turn up of the visitors in the event. Hence, participating embassies can easily embrace huge crowd during the day long festival.
In the festival, Bangladesh pavilion was the point of interest of the visitors and drew a huge crowd. Beautifully decorated, with national flag and nokshi-katha, Bangladesh pavilion presented varieties of handicrafts, hand-embroidered items, jamdani saree, clay items, brassware, jute and leather products and other traditional items. To introduce Bangladeshi cuisine, Bangladesh pavilion offered singara, shomucha, piaju, fish chop, shashlik, Hilsa fry, biryani, roshgolla, golabjamun etc. Being present at the pavilion H.E. Sheikh Mohammed Belal, Bangladesh Ambassador to the Netherlands and his wife Dr. Dilruba Nasrin received the visitors, responded to different queries of the visitors and exchanged their views. Bangladesh pavilion also distributed tourism related pamphlets and brochures among the visitors. Embassy officials along with the members of family remain very busy in receiving and entertaining the visitors at the pavilion. The visitors praised the traditional products of Bangladesh and picked some items of their choice. Also Bangladeshi mouthwatering snacks and lunch items were in high demand among both international visitors and expatriate Bangladesh community. Bangladeshi kid, Ahona Shaha took part in the cultural event of the festival and her dance performance on patriotic song was much appreciated.
Ambassador Belal, during his conversation with visitors, mentioned about ongoing development spree of Bangladesh. He conveyed felicitations to the organizers of the festival for such unique arrangement of promoting cultural diversity. Through this festival, not only visitors can be acquainted with multicultural atmosphere but also the embassies get opportunities to promote their culture and tradition.
Indeed, Embassy festival is a very successful flagship event of the Netherlands. Participation in the festival enables Bangladesh Embassy to reach out large number of Dutch visitors to endorse Bangladeshi products, handicrafts, tourism, culture and cuisine. Overall, the visitors were found very keen to know about Bangladeshi culture. Proceeds from the pavilion shall go towards charity.