Halloween Tours
The Rooms in this October specialty tour also have spooky stories to get guests into the Halloween mood! Tour guides learn a short ghost story from the Room’s culture or country of origin to go along with a summary of the main features of the Room. Trainees are prioritized during Room selection to help them become familiar and comfortable with how tours work. This event usually occurs the weekend before Halloween.
Tea Tours
Our spring tour is all about good hot leaf juice, so it focuses on regions with rich tea cultures. Trivia includes which teas are grown or preferred in a given country, how tea was introduced to them, the role tea plays in that culture, and special customs around serving tea. After learning about tea's importance, guests get to sample some for themselves!
OPEN HOUSE
December
Open House is a festival of the Nationality Rooms and of local cultural groups that takes place in early December. Each committee has its own booth in the Commons Room and sells art and food, while dance and music performances take place every 15 minutes. Guides are stationed in each of the Nationality Rooms, which have all been decorated for the holidays. Information about the holiday represented in each Room and its related customs is included in the tour, as guests cycle in and out of Rooms at their leisure. An extra fun part of Open House are the outfits! Each Room has traditional garb associated with it, and guides are able to dress up in them to give the tours!
February
D.C. TRIP
Every February, we use the funds we have received to go on a field trip to Washington, D. C. The trip lasts three days, as we leave on a Friday morning and return by Sunday evening. Once we arrive on the first day, we visit some of the embassies, usually those that represent a Nationality Room, though not necessarily. On our 2020 trip, we visited the embassies for the Holy See and the Philippines. Saturday is all about different sites such as monuments or museums, and Sunday morning is usually open for people to visit the museums that they didn’t get to see the day before!
