(Minghui.org) The 62nd Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa, the largest one in the world, took place from May 9 to May 19. Hundreds of thousands of tourists came to the festival. Local Falun Gong practitioners took this chance to bring the beauty of this ancient cultivation practice to the public, and to expose the brutal persecution of it in China.
At Dow's Lake Park, practitioners demonstrated the exercises, passed out materials and held free workshops to teach the exercises.
Group exercise in Dow's Lake Park during the Tulip Festival
Many tourists come to the festival
Teaching the exercises
Many tourists were drawn by the beautiful music and gentle movement, and took photos and videos. Some of them also asked for information about local exercise sites.
Dina Yazji and Fares Wali, two local college students, have seen Falun Gong at community events, and they had wanted to learn. Today, they got the chance to practice all five sets of the exercises with practitioners. They were surprised and happy to hear that instruction videos and books can be downloaded for free from the Internet.
Many Chinese people also talked to practitioners and accepted Falun Gong materials.
Mr. Huang, a student from Beijing, quit the Communist Young Pioneers and Youth League. He had gotten a Falun Gong newspaper in Manhattan, New York a few months ago.
“I didn't know all that about Falun Gong. After reading the newspaper, I realized that I had been deceived by the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
“My father abandoned the party after the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, 1989. He often told me that if the communist party attacks something, that thing must be good,” Mr. Huang said, “He also encourages me to gain information from oversea media.”
Mr. Huang was happy to accept materials from the practitioners. “I will tell my father about the tools for breaking through the Internet blockade in China. He will be really happy.”
Mr. Huang asked many questions about Falun Gong, and was satisfied with the practitioners' answers. He wanted to practice it too, and plans to join the local exercise site later.
According to the official website of Ottawa's tourism board, “This festival is a celebration founded on international friendship with the 1945 presentation of 100,000 tulip bulbs from Princess Juliana of the Netherlands to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, given in appreciation of the safe haven that members of Holland’s exiled royal family received during World War II in Ottawa and in recognition of the role which Canadian troops played in the liberation of the Netherlands.”
