My name is Muhammad Javed Iqbal (JD). I am from Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Now that I’ve been here in China for a year.Here are some of the highlights from the 2016 SDU International Festival Cultural Show.

One thing I realized while living in China was how important it is to take full advantage of your time there.There are so many cities in China that I would have loved to travel to after class, but there’s too much to see in such a short period of time. We were lucky enough to spend time in Shanghai, Beijing, Weifang, Linyi, and Qufu on shorter trips, plus our one week spring break in Shanghai. When I was in Shanghai, suddenly I received a call from my brother about International Cultural Festival. We decided to give a dance performance and I told him I would come as earlier as possible. I spent one week visiting some places in Shanghai and then booked my air ticket to go back to Jinan.

The International Culture Festival Show was held at SDU Concert Hall on October30, 2016. In this show, different performances like singing, dancing were presented by a number of international students from various countries. We had seven people in the group who wanted to perform: Dr. Muhammad Ijaz (Jazzy), Muhammad Javed Iqbal (JD), Muhammad Ali, Sarim, Haroon, Wasiq, and Aqil. We practiced every day and we gave audition and finally we were able to perform in the show. We were so excited that we were determined to make the show as popular and enjoyable as we could.

Our dancing group from right to left: Muhammad Javed Iqbal (JD). Dr. Muhammad Ijaz (Jazzy), Haroon Ali, Muhammad Ali (also the host of this show), Wasiq Naseer, and Sarim Siddique.

This is our brother Aqil who not only gave us tremendous emotions for dancing through Punjabi Dhol (double-headed drum) but also gave us more drum beats to perform dance with full intention. More importantly, on this occasion we could not forget the efforts of my role model and our leader “Dr. Muhammad Ijaz (Jazzy)” who helped us to complete this difficult task, and trained us in a very short time period.

In addition to participating in different Chinese and foreign cultural performances like dancing and martial arts, international students also showed their national identity with unique clothes and exotic music.

After the great dance performance where we showed our love with Chinese through our sign board “中巴友谊万岁”(zhong ba you yi wan sui, long live the Sino-Pakistan friendship) and our rocking performance. I could hear a lot of voices saying “中巴友谊万岁” and well done team Pakistan to perform excellent dance in this show. We won hearts of audience. We cannot forget this moment.

Author: Muhammad Javed Iqbal (JD) from the School of Economics, SDU

Editor: Chen Shangmin, Lang Cuicui