This post chronicles my visit to the Edmonton Heritage Festival 2025 that went on from Aug 02 to Aug 04 2025 at Borden Park and Exhibition Lands, next to the Edmonton EXPO Centre.
This blog post was mostly written across Aug 04-Aug 07 2025. Rain fell on all three days of the event this year, and there was a heat warning in the city that overlapped with the first day of the event, but Jon, Kel, and I went to the event on the 3rd day of the event, Mon Aug 04, after the rain in the morning had stopped.
It is also VERY LONG with lots of pictures, you are prewarned (well your device is probably starting to load them already) if you are on limited data plans.
Table of Contents
ට Introduction
ට Gallery of Country Tents
ට Misc Event Pictures
ට Food Pictures
ට Other Swag
Introduction
The festival is usually held in Hawrelak Park, and the format has each country being alloted one or two tents, and then turning the tent/s into food or souvenir shops and staffing them with volunteers from what assumedly is the country’s local cultural association. The last time I visited this event was in 2021, in Hawrelak Park, but in 2023 (local) the location was changed to Borden Park as Hawrelak Park was undergoing renovations. However, the location of the event is switching back to Hawrelak Park next year, in 2026, so 2025 is the last year it will be in this temporary location. Thus it is a good year to go catalogue the event.
This event is or was also known as the Servus Heritage Festival, or more colloquially Heritage Days — almost everyone in Edmonton still calls it Heritage Days even though it’s not its official name. I guess it changed or something at some point but I was unable to figure out when on a cursory Google search. Or maybe it’s just local slang. I’ve always loved the name Heritage Days though. It feels very “lazy summer days filled with love and respect for others”. The event is always held on our August long weekend, with the Monday of this week being a provincial holiday called Heritage Day.
The website for the 2025 version of the event is here (local). You’d think based on the URL, you could change the “2025” to an earlier year and you’d find archived versions of past year’s festivals, but you’d be wrong. There’s also a main page of the website here (local) but the middle part of the page does not capture well due to poor website design practices. Basically the webmaster of this event sucks, destroying previous digital heritage artifacts and making current ones difficult to archive. Here are some stills of the middle part of the page that didn’t capture with the full (local) one above (01 02).
There is a PDF of the event’s food and drink menu here (local). I had my Discord friends give me some suggestions on what to buy as always, and I have pictures of some of those food items down below too. There is also a site map PDF over here (local). And they made a weird little Getting to the Festival card so I captured that too (local). The filenames are horrendous too. I preserved them and added the date at the end. And the FAQ doesn’t allow you to open more than one question at a time so there’s no capturing that one without capturing 10 different pages (01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10). Also the website name still has a slug of faq-2024. Website design please. Here’s the Code of Conduct document (local) from the website, and the Festival Tips (local) page, which I’m surprised isn’t chopped up into 9 unsaveable parts too. Here’s the director page for 2025 (local) too, since that sort of thing tends to be needed as a point of reference by future historians or researchers.
Gallery of Country Tents
General Info/Map
When the name of the tent differs between the menu and the main event map itself, or the actual tent display, I used the name on the event map as the authoritative one for purposes of sorting here.
There are many more tents here compared to the last time I came in 2021 too, since that one was the first one held after the cancellation of the in-person event in 2020 due to the pandemic. I don’t know what the 2022-2024 rosters were like though. But the absences from the 2021 one are as follows: Burkina Faso, Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. I know the African countries sometimes share a tent though, though I can’t always tell them apart when they do so.
And this is meant to be a non-political event, but nonetheless Russia has not had a tent since 2022, partly due to the war, but also due to both aggressive appeals from the Ukrainian contingent as well as a refusal from the Russian side to play nice. Other such world issues haven’t had such a drastic impact though, for example the local Israel and Palestine contingents do not seem to have such a negative reaction to each other’s presences. Anyway this article (local) is a nice starting read on the documentation of the Russian issue at Heritage Days (as well as a mention of other tents with problems, like Eritrea), and one that I want to back up here.
Also, as an aside, there were SO MANY country tents with henna/face painting stations. So very weird and unoriginal.
Anyway, there was an event booklet that we picked up from the Edmonton Food Bank table near the front of the event. Donations were suggested but not required, but I donated $5 to them anyway. I learnt that Heritage Days was their main fundraising event of the year as well, at least according to the lady manning the table. I did not realize that. This booklet was meaningful though — it had the temporary location printed on it as well and would be the last one printed that way of course.
It is a long booklet, but here are its pages:
And then this map inlay (which is why one of the scans above is also 3 pages long instead of two). This is at the end instead of the middle for (my) easier reference.
I told you it was long. Now here are the country tents.
Australia
Azerbaijan
Bangladesh
Barbados
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia was one of the last tents that I visited, a little over an hour before closing time. They were already packing up at that time, one of two tents that were already packing up before I got there. Their loss, really. That means instead of their culture and/or food being chronicled, instead what gets chronicled is that they closed up early and that’s kind of disrespectful. The other country that did this early (at least, the one that I didn’t get to in time before they closed shop) is Taiwan. Others may have closed too but I was already past them and did not see them.
Cameroon
China
The China tent is the pavilion that I spent the longest time in, because one of the things that they had was a pet picture drawing table by volunteers. I asked if they would do Tigey and the answer was yes, so of course I waited around for that. I’ll put my story for that in the “Other Swag” section at the bottom of this post though. For now, here are a glut of culture and food pictures from it:
Colombia
ALPACA PLUSHIES. I didn’t buy any. I already have one.
Congo (a.k.a Democratic Republic of the Congo)
In the menu, they spell it Democractic. This is one of the reasons why I didn’t sort these tents by menu order.
Côte d’Ivoire
Croatia
Cuba
Ecuador
El Salvador
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Fiji
The Fiji tent (Tent 35) was supposed to be in the Racetrack area, next to France (Tent 34), but it was not. Instead, after wandering around looking for it and not finding it, we went out to the West Lot and found it there instead. Weird!
France
Germany
I’ve never heard of the card game called skat, interesting. It was also worth noting here that Switzerland did not have its own tent, but they did have a table in the Germany tent. And that Swissness is a word?
Ghana
Hong Kong
I believe, but can’t confirm, that the ladies in the bottom picture here were performing wushu.
Hungary
India
Indigenous (a.k.a Canada Indigenous)
On the map, this tent was called Indigenous. On the menu, this tent was called Canada Indigenous — and was sorted poorly, being placed after “Bosnia and Herzegovina” but before “Cameroon”.
Indonesia
Iran
This was one of the two or three pavilions in the festival that had their own barbecue grill going, with plumes of smoke wafting out from the tent over the festival. I… did not dislike that feeling and ambience.
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
I didn’t buy any food from here, but I did buy a couple of items, which are shown below in the Other Swag section. Also of note is that Yutaka Experience corner — this is similar to the one I did back in 2019. I didn’t see it when I went this year though. But I did see the taiko drumming group, Kita no Taiko (local), at both events, as well as here. We also caught the Bon Odori dance later on in the evening, that picture is at the end of this Japan section.
Kenya
Korea
Kurdistan
Lebanon
Liberia
Malaysia and Singapore
I wore a Singapore-themed shirt here, specifically my secondary school shirt, but no one noticed or commented on it. Not sure there were any actual Singaporean staff here when I was here! The group outside the tent was dancing to a song called Si Jantung Hati by Angeline Wong.
Mauritius
Mexico
Mexico brought along a couple of food trucks too, for whatever reason.
Mongolia
Morocco
Myanmar
Nepal
Netherlands
Newcomers (Somalia/Senegal)
The concept of the newcomers tent is always interesting. Back in 2021, the newcomers tent consisted of Nigeria and Eritrea, and I noted back then that both of those countries had actual tents in 2019. Both of them have actual tents in 2025, too. I don’t come here every year so I don’t know what it was like last year, but neither Somalia nor Senegal had tents in 2019 or 2021, so they are definitely newcomers to me.
Senegal and Somalia:
Senegal. Take note of this lady in the beautiful dress and headpiece, she features again later on in my blog:
Somalia:
Somalia:
Somalia:
Nicaragua
Odd, isn’t it? The alphabetical map in the printed booklet as well as the digital map on the website lists both Nicaragua and Netherlands as being in Tent 6, whereas the numerical map just lists Netherlands as being in Tent 6 and there being no Nicaragua tent at all. See how the number of entries in each box differ from each other by 1? Poor Nicaragua. What happened to them? Where’s their tent?
Nigeria
Oromia (a.k.a Oromia (Oromo))
They were dancing to a song called Tuulamarraan by Minew Shewa Tube, and as you can see, doing a similar dance.
We were going to try some food from here but the queue was too long and our mouths too dry for more pastry-type stuff.
Pakistan
Apparently someone complained about their green chutney. No cash, no kulfi, no chai. 🙁
Palestine
Peru
Philippines
They also had a couple of food trucks! And a lottery game thing. And a sample table where they were letting people try a bit of meat with a chilli garlic sauce on it. It wasn’t particularly hot, though the oil left a tingle on the tongue afterwards, so whether one found it “hot” or not probably depended on how much oil their sample had and how they ate it..
There was also this Sosyal Scoops ice cream truck that was between the China (49) and India (50) tents but was decidedly Filipino (43).
Poland
Portugal
Romania
A couple of countries were selling “Elephant Ears” and this was apparently a really popular festival food. Also those ladies on stage were not dancing, it just kind of looked like it afterwards in the photo, ha.
Scandinavia (a.k.a Scandinavian Countries (Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland))
Serbia
They had two food queues, one for the “desserts”, including elephant ears, that was extremely long, and one for regular food that was extremely short. We bought some regular food here, so we got to skip the long line!
Also, not pictured, but one or two of the staff were wearing the “STRONG, Smart, Good Looking, Must be SERBIAN” aprons that I saw back in 2021 and also in 2019. I love them!
Spain
Sudan
Featuring a man with devil horns!
Taiwan
As mentioned above, besides Bosnia and Herzegovina, Taiwan was the other country that I didn’t get a good tent picture for because they were already closing down when I arrived over an hour before closing time. Thus what gets chronicled instead is the early half-closed tent. Kel said that it was pretty dead already when they walked by it on the way out an hour prior though.
Thailand
Togo
That guy happily dancing at the end picture here was dancing to Chop My Money by P-Square. We were laughing about the lyrics of the song after. He was sooo happy and his happiness was infectious.
Türkiye
Uganda
Ukraine
Uyghur
Watch the ice cream man “Yoink!” the cone away from the customer!
Vietnam
Vietnam was one of the last tents I visited too and they were partially shut down, I think. They had four cups of Vietnamese Iced Coffee left on their food table and had a sign up saying that those cups were Buy 1 Get 1 Free. I didn’t buy any though. I don’t drink coffee!
Misc Event Pictures
This was slightly
Remember the girl at the Newcomers/Senegal tent earlier? I saw her later on near the China tent as well, when I was waiting for my drawing (story for that part below). I thought this kind of represented the vibe of the festival for me:
Beautiful, elegantly-dressed, enjoying the cross-cultural festival… and surrounded by a sea of garbage on the ground. Great job, Edmonton.
Anyway, the event was very busy. Here are a couple of random pictures just showing the crowd:
It drizzled a little bit during the afternoon, but became hotter as the afternoon turned into evening. This day was also still the day with the best weather out of the three event days, so most people just continued unfazed anyway. There were a couple of miscellaneous tents that were very popular as well — the mist tent and the rest/shade tent:
The park was also next to the Edmonton EXPO Centre, where K-Days took place the previous week, and Hall H was actually open as an indoor rest area and volunteer coordination area. This hall also connected the front of the building, near where the LRT entrance was, to the Heritage Festival area behind the building.
There were a bunch of sponsor tents scattered around the festival grounds too. I didn’t catch all of them, but the ones I did catch included–
Robertson College:
Rogers:
CBC:
TD Bank:
Kiwanis Club of South Edmonton, plus bonus Lost & Found Items/People tents:
Edmonton Food Bank (although this was not the booth that I donated and picked up my booklet from, that one was just outside the EXPO Centre hall):
Norquest:
and Telus:
There were also at least two St John‘s Ambulance first aid tents:
And one Alberta Paramedical Services tent:
There were rows of portable public toilets around the festival grounds:
Information booths that look like these:
And I think there were supposed to be posters introducing each section of the festival as well, but the only one I found was tucked away by the side of a fence, so maybe they gave this idea up fairly early on:
Food Pictures
From the Eritrea tent, we had Shiro. The menu said there was only a $10 version of it, but at the store there were smaller sample sizes of this dish and other dishes for $5. We took the $5 version and split it among the three of us. The porey moccasin-like thing is a kind of sourdough bread, and I think the topping placed on it is supposed to be a chickpea curry but there wasn’t actually any chickpea (unless it was heavily smooshed into the curry itself). This dish was okay, but not spectacular. Definitely a taste I don’t experience often if ever though.
From the Iran tent, we had Bastani Zaferooni, or saffron ice cream with pistachio nuts, for $6. Kel sponsored this one. It tasted kind of similar to my favourite ice cream flavour, sweetcorn, but not quite. Not bad, though.
From the Lebanon tent, we had Battata Hara, a cup of potato wedges with spices for $9. It was a very low amount of food for its price but it was great-tasting. Yummy!
From the Pakistan tent, we had Goat Qorma, by far the most expensive dish that we had here — it was $18. It was basically chicken korma, but goat. And very filling, even split three ways.
From the Serbia tent, we had Svadbarski Kupus, or traditional cabbage in stew. This cost $7 and they offered a stick of bread too, but I said no to it. All three of us loved this cabbage stew. Easily the best thing we had today! I’ve had this one (also with bread) before too, back in 2021, and it cost only $6 then. Inflation!! Kel looked up a couple of recipes and saw that this was also called Wedding Cabbage, so that’s what we called it for the rest of the afternoon
.
From the Australian tent, we had Kanga Banga, which is apparently kangaroo meat sausage and was very smoky. It came with a single slice of bread and cost $7.50. The item description in the booklet above calls it a “puffy, pillow-like slice of white bread”. Hah. Nah, it was just some random, normal slice of bread.
We also had this drink, a “Lemon, Lime & Bitters Drink” that they also affectionately called the “Warney”. I had also bought this one back in 2021, but I don’t remember it having a name back then. The Australian pavilion said it was one of the festival’s most popular drinks, and Jon sponsored it this time. When he bought the drink, they asked if he wanted two since we went up together as a group of three, and when he said no, the guy exclaimed that surely we’d be back for a second at some point, haha. It cost $5.50.
Lastly, from the Palestine tent, I had these two items. Kel and Jon had gone home by now because it was getting late and they lived further away from me, so I had these all to myself. Firstly a Knafi Nabulsieh, or Kunafa, for $8. This was pastry with a rose syrup sort of topping on top. It was not particularly sweet, which suits me just fine, and the texture of the sticky sprinkles on top still lingers with me a couple of days after.
Then I washed it down with some Mint Limonada, basically lemonade with a different sort of sprinkle on top. This cost $4.
This was the only store that actually let me keep a physical receipt. I did my order on the right side of the booth and was given the receipt to go pick up my items on the left side of the booth, but I only had two hands and needed to take pictures of the items anyway so I picked up the kunafa first, had that, and then picked up the limonada after to wash it down.
The servers were different people so after picking the kunafa up, they told me to go to the other side to pick up my limonada, and several minutes later, after disposing of the kunafa plate and picking the limonada up, they told me to go to the other, other side to pick up my kunafa. Oh dear.
Other Swag
So China had a table of volunteers drawing people’s pet pictures, and of course I wanted to get Tigey drawn. Jon and Kel were still there at the time when I first noticed this table, so we went walking onwards to the other tents first. But they eventually had to leave earlier than I did, and once they did so, I went back to that tent to get Tigey drawn.
This drawing cost $20 but came with an actual picture frame that they would put the picture in and then give to the owner. I said I didn’t need the frame though, so the really nice lady in charge of the volunteers said I could have a discount on mine, but I said that I didn’t need a discount (I had already paid for it at a separate table in the China tent and was given a ticket to bring over to this volunteer lady), so she instead said that I could have a slightly larger drawing. That was nice of her!
There were five girls doing artwork at the table, which was staffed by the Chinese Graduates Association of Alberta (local). Four of them were older girls, likely University-aged students, but the fifth one was a younger girl that looked like she was somewhere around 12 years old. The volunteer lady, in the pink shirt below, was thrilled to take on Tigey as a commission, but asked if I would mind if the young girl drew Tigey‘s picture instead. I said no, I definitely didn’t mind, as long as I had some sort of artist name to credit the art to!
The scary part here is that I had to leave Tigey behind while the young girl in the yellow shirt above drew the picture. You can see him sitting on the table above. The volunteer lady took my name and phone number down in a book so that she could text me once the picture was done, so I wandered away to the nearby Palestine tent to buy some food there because the line there was really long, but I had no real idea how long it would take and didn’t want to go too far away in case I received the phone text while I was far away. I was a little paranoid that Tigey would fall victim to someone’s sleight of hand after the picture was drawn or something.
Once I was done the food, I wandered back to around the China tent and browsed their wares for a bit, before just standing by the table and waiting for it to be finished. I had realized at some point that this would take a while because it was a watercolour, but I could also see that the drawing was somewhat near completion already, the girl was just adding decorations to the picture. Since it was a watercolour though, there was waiting time between layers of paint as she had to wait for one coat to dry before adding the next, so I kind of stood around side-eyeing her as she scrolled through social media and ate some dinner in between bouts of painting. In the end, it took about an hour, but it was very much worth it.
It’s so lovely! The artist’s name is Leya, and I got the vibe that she was the volunteer lady’s daughter. They had a couple of exchanges like the lady asking the girl what she should say when I said thank you to her a number of times, and the girl simply shrugged in response. And also the lady inviting me to take a picture of the drawing together with the girl in the background, which is what transpired to create the one two pictures above this paragraph.
The lady also asked to see other pictures of Tigey when I mentioned that I had a collection, and when I showed her a couple of the ones I had gotten from K-Days, she was thrilled and gave me a hug. When she found out I was from Singapore, she also told me about a night market event coming up soon in Edmonton, that they would be at in some capacity as well, AsiaFest YEG 2025 (local) in the Windermere neighbourhood. Apparently Singapore (and Indonesia and Malaysia) will be the themes of this year’s festival. It takes place Sep 12-14, and I’ve marked my calendar!
Regarding the book of names and phone numbers, I was waiting there anyway so they didn’t need to text me to come pick up my drawing, but all the volunteer drawings took a long time to do and I noticed that some of the texts the volunteer lady was sending out, especially nearer the end of the event, included a picture of the person’s completed drawing, and she then asked for the person’s address so that they could deliver the drawing and frame, free of charge, to them. That was super nice of them. One of the guys nearby had two Arc cards in his hand and seemed to be the person in charge of delivering those paintings. Why he needed two transit cards I have no idea though.
While waiting for my drawing, I also picked up a Chinese lucky fortune from the fortune table pictured much higher up this page. This was what it read:
I definitely don’t do things half-heartedly! Definitely not.
This fortune cost $2 and also came with a fortune cookie, which itself also had a fortune slip inside:
I will indeed always live in interesting times.
Earlier while at the Japanese tent, I had also picked up a fortune, called an omikuji, from there. This one cost $3 and was a little bit more complex than the Chinese one:
One of the women manning the Japanese table had also said that all their items were imported from Japan, and they were cheap to boot, so I picked up a folded cloth that was basically a tenugui, which I had picked up my first one of about a month ago. This only cost $5.
Definitely imported from Japan. Just ignore that “Made in China” tag over there in the corner, huh.
There were a couple other brochures and stuff that I picked up, but those will be eventually posted on archive.org rather than here. The only other item that properly belongs here is probably this sticker, which we got from the Edmonton Food Bank table that we donated at.
Phew, 372 pictures later, this chronicle post is finally more or less complete!