The Darfur horse festival is a traditional Sudanese event. During the festival people perform songs and dances which date from hundreds of year ago.

Following years of conflict the horse festival has been revived with a special purpose: to provide a common cultural backdrop for discussing peace and reconciliation in the area. Held in the southern Darfuri town of Addu’ayn, the festival was attended by leaders from both nomadic Arab and black African groups, representing the main ethnic groups of the region.

BBC News shows stunning pictures of the festival.

Photo: Darfur horse festival in pictures from the BBC

Multicultural.co.uk is a website written for UK businesses, to help them work better with multicultural employees and customers. However if you’re just interested in learning more about how people of different cultures and religions think and behave, you will also find some useful information here.

In particular, you can follow short online courses to learn about the major faiths (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism) and country-specific courses on China, Russia and India. At the end of each course there is a downloadable pdf guide.

The country courses contain many cultural tips such as:

• Chinese people may find it difficult to say ‘no’ even if they mean it. It’s unlikely you’ll ever hear a Chinese person saying something like ‘speak your mind’
• Indian names often do not follow the same pattern as western names. Some Indians use their occupation, caste or even ancestral village as a sort of surname
• Russians prefer to eat a hot and substantial meal at lunchtime

An interesting read if you want to learn more about any of these cultures or religions, and will also come in useful for anyone planning to visit or do business in Russia, India or China.

The culture and food of Penang in Malaysia has been heavily influenced by immigrants. Inputs from mainland China, and more recently India and Sri Lanka have blended with local Malay flavours to make up this unique and world famous cuisine.

For immigrants life here opening a street food stand is an accessible, low-investment way to make a living. However life is tough - many work from 6am to 10am to earn enough to keep themselves and save some money for their families.

The first episode in the street food series from Al Jazeera explains the story of Penang street food (to watch online follow the link from the article).

Photo: Cathryn on pbase

Future programmes will look at tapas traditions in the Basque country of Spain, London’s famous Brick Lane, New York, Nairobi, Beijing, Cairo and Jerusalem. If the first programme is anything to go by the rest will definitely be worth watching.

The modern day silk road country of Kazakhstan continues to develop a thriving arts scene. But how important is classical music in a society which is busy discovering other advantages of globalisation?

The International Herald Tribune describes some of the challenges faced by young Kazakh musicians. As do musicians all over the world they eschew better-paid careers in other sectors. However they face an additional cultural challenge - learning to take risks after growing up in a regime which encouraged conformity and punished mistakes.

The musicians have faced some difficult decisions in comitting to perform increasingly technically challenging pieces in public:

“Having been raised in a Soviet-style system that taught them to obey orders and, above all, to avoid mistakes, they feared they would fail publicly and spectacularly”

Like many others in the region, they are embarking on an extraordinary journey of cultural transformation.

Image from 5.12 China: The song of miracle by Coco Wang. (Published by Paul Gravett)

Chinese writer and artist Coco Wang was so overwhelmed by the tragedy of China’s recent earthquake that she created a set of incredibly moving comic strips to try and retell some of the stories to the rest of the world.

The stories are all based on accounts of the rescue work collected from newspapers. They highlight the bravery, kindness, tenacity and ability to smile in the face of hardship of the Chinese people following this disaster.

A few weeks ago we wrote about the films from around the world shown on May 10th, Pangea Day. It seems like the event was a great success, with screenings in many diffferent world locations including Cairo, London, Los Angeles and Mumbai.

If you didn’t catch one of the live showings, don’t worry because the programme has now been uploaded onto the Pangea Day website. There are 51 short films from many different places and you can watch them here.

After Pangea Day which brought the world together through films from around the world, the International Day for Sharing Life Stories aims to bring people together through stories. In a mixture of live performances and digitally recorded stories, people from all over the world will talk about their lives.

As well as the official event, the organisers are inviting people to host local community get-togethers to share their stories. The website also has details of other events inspired by the life story day, including a Canadian project to share family traditions.

Photo from British Colombia Literacy Forum’s share a family tradition project

The International Day for Sharing Life Stories is coordinated by the Museu da Pessoa and will take place on May 16th, 2008.

Migration from Poland to the United Kingdom over the 4 years since Poland joined the EU has been the largest wave of migration to the UK in centuries. Immigrants typically find work as plumbers, builders or manual work on farms.

The UK economy has benefitted enormously from this migration wave, especially small businesses who previously found it hard to recruit enough employees. However as prospects improve in Poland, many immigrants are thinking about going home. Others have decided to stay in the UK, and are taking part in community activities such as teaching locals about Polish culture and traditions.

This article from the Independent looks at the reasons behind their decision to stay or leave, and the potential consequences for the UK.

What are your views on migration? Do the positive effects outweigh the negative ones? Please let us know what you think in the comments.

Our purpose here at PocketCultures is to try to bridge differences between people of different nationalities by showing new aspects of different countries and world cultures. It’s an area which in our opinion is not getting enough attention at present, which is why we were delighted to find out about Pangea Day - an innovative event by leading film makers aiming to change the way we think about other countries.

The main screening itself will be held on May 10, at locations all around the world, and also broadcast live on the internet and television. But you can already catch some trailers on YouTube. Among those submitted so far are ‘Japan sings for Turkey’, a traditional Japanese rendition of the Turkish national anthem, ‘France sings for USA’ - elegantly-shot black and white scenes of Paris set to the background of Parisians singing the Star Spangled Banner.

Documentary maker Jehane Noujaim, the inspiration behind the event, explains the reasoning behind the idea of using films to show stories in this article. Learning someone’s story, and coming to see them as a person, rather than a ‘foreigner’ is key to breaking down prejudices.

Update: the films have now been uploaded to the Pangea Day website. Watch them here.

Queen Rania of Jordan is embracing technology in her efforts to increase cross-cultural dialogue and help understanding between her country and the rest of the world.

She has launched a YouTube page to try to answer people’s questions about Arabs and the Middle East. She will accept questions until August 12th.

In her vlog she says that she has been surprised by some of the questions she has received so far (such as ‘do all Arabs hate Americans?’) and she aims to break some stereotypes with her campaign and help people to see the real side of the Arab and Muslim world and culture.

This initiative is sure to raise a lot of awareness - there are already more than 500 questions posted on the YouTube page.

Whilst Queen Rania is obviously not an average citizen of Jordan or the Middle East and so probably cannot speak for all the Arab world, this initiative should help to increase awareness and understanding of some important facts.

Tip-off from Global Voices Online.