The Most Unusual Festivals In The World.docx

**The Most Unusual Festivals In The World** Some annual festivals emerge out of religious rituals or cultural events, while others come about because of marketing experiments or boredom. Here are the festivals that might make you scratch your head. **Wife Carrying World Championship --- Sonkajärvi...

**The Most Unusual Festivals In The World** Some annual festivals emerge out of religious rituals or cultural events, while others come about because of marketing experiments or boredom. Here are the festivals that might make you scratch your head. **Wife Carrying World Championship --- Sonkajärvi, Finland** Wife carrying, or *eukonkanto* in Finnish, originated as a sport in Sonkajärvi, Finland, in 1992. The exact origins of the tradition are unknown, but each story has something to do with theft. Today, wife carrying is practiced around the world. Participants are allowed to carry their wives in a variety of ways - including piggyback, fireman's carry or Estonian-style, where the wife hangs upside-down with her legs around her husband's shoulders. They carry her across a 253.5-meter track riddled with obstacles. The prize is awarded based on the wife's weight in beer. **The Baby Jumping Festival --- Castrillo de Murcia, Spain** Known to the Spanish locals as *El Colacho*, this festival happens 60 days after Easter during the feast of Corpus Christi. The Baby Jumping Festival is a baptismal ceremony wherein babies who were born over the last year to release from sins. The religious custom dates back to the early 1600s. Men dressed in traditional "devilish" clothing terrorize the crowd before running down the street and jumping over the babies who have been carefully laid out on pillows. No injuries have been reported, but the Catholic higher-ups frown upon the ritual. **International Hair Freezing Contest --- Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada** Located up in the frigid province of Yukon, Canada, the International Hair Freezing Contest is a fun winter celebration that occurs every February at the Takhini Hot Pools. Participants in the contest dunk their heads in the hot water of the pools and then create frosty hairdos by shaping their locks as they freeze in the cold air above. Temperatures in the area can reach below -30° Celsius, or -22° Fahrenheit, at the time of the contest. Winners receive a monetary award and a month's supply of hair-care lotion. **La Tomatina --- Buñol, Valencia, Spain** The Spanish Tomato Festival has run annually in August during a weeklong celebration in Buñol since 1945, when a rowdy crowd took the tomatoes from a vegetable stall and started a food fight. The hour-long tomato fight used up an estimated 145,000 kg of tomatoes in 2015. Since 2013 La Tomatina has been a ticketed event to limit participants to just 20,000. Before then, up to 50,000 guests had been reportedly involved in the food fight. After an hour of free-for-all tomato tossing, trucks spray down the streets and many participants wash themselves in the pool of "los peñones." **Underwater Music Festival --- Looe Key Reef, Florida, USA** Located in the Florida Keys in the United States' only living coral barrier reef, the Underwater Music Festival has been running for 31 years. A local radio station sponsors the event to encourage environmental sustainability and responsible diving, and they play their sea-themed music underwater through speakers that are suspended under boats situated above the reef. Participants are encouraged to wear costumes and play "underwater instruments" to compete for prizes.