On Oct. 25, the World Languages and Cultures department held its Fall Festival in the Faculty Dining Room.

The event was aimed at all language majors and minors, as well as anyone else who is interested in learning about other cultures.

The annual event consists of cultural activities, food and games, which bring multicultural understanding and give students from different language departments an opportunity to mix with one another.

“Having a cross-language party is important to let our majors and minors get to know each other,” said Spanish professor Alice Edwards, who was the main organizer of the event.

“Students from different majors and minors can interact, when they might not otherwise, since French and Spanish and Mandarin students are not in class with each other.”

The event also brings an opportunity for interaction between World Cultures staff and the Fulbright scholars.

“I liked being able to meet other people from outside the Spanish department,” said sophomore Spanish Education major Lucy Belleau. “This was an awesome event.”

Aside from the language majors and minors, the Fall Festival introduced this year’s World Learning students to the rest of the Mercyhurst student body. These World Learning scholars are exchange students who come to the U.S. for one semester to attend classes at Mercyhurst. This year, the students arrived from Russia, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam.

“It was really cool to get to talk to people of different cultural backgrounds,” said sophomore Brenden Jackett, who has a minor in Arabic and Islamic Studies.

Activities included snacks, cookie decorating, icebreakers and a raffle with intercultural prizes. One of the icebreakers involved finding the person in the room who spoke the most languages, for which many people tied at four, but exchange student Kit Zhen Kong was victorious with fluency in five languages.

Meng Wang, instructor of Asian Studies, also wrote everyone’s name in Chinese calligraphy.

“My favorite activity was the raffle because I won a CD of Russian accordion music,” said sophomore Russian Studies major Jason Bowser.

Overall, it was a great opportunity to celebrate world cultures and bring our Mercyhurst community together for fall.