Salem`s World Beat Festival, Crowning Event for the Start of our Summer Season (VIDEO)

The 9th annual event at Salem`s Riverfront Park was recently voted the best cultural heritage event by the Oregon Festivals and Events Association.

Dragon Boat races happen Sunday

(SALEM) - Always held in the last weekend of June in Salem`s beautiful Riverfront Park, World Beat is a good way to kick off a family weekend adventure and educate children in the meaning of cultural tolerance.

Planning and strategy meetings have been taking place for months, and with a crowd of 45k last year, they are expecting more this year because of the event`s growing popularity.

World Beat celebrates the cultures, customs, traditions and heritage that makes Oregon an inviting place that people want to visit, and experience.

Music, food, dance, arts and crafts of people from throughout the world are showcased in five themed world villages.

World Beat features more than 125 performances, workshops and demonstrations ranging from costumed parades to Gaelic language workshops.

The featured event, Dragon Boat Races will be held this Sunday.

A lot of preparatory work is underway and it takes hundreds of man-hours to bring the event together. In fact, organizers say it starts way before the weekend of the event.

The Salem World Beat Festival is held Saturday, June 24th, and Sunday, June 25th. Saturday kicks off with the Children's Parade at 10:00 AM, and goes through 11:00 PM. On Sunday, the hours are 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Watch the video report by Kevin Montgomery below Video

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If you looked at the date of this story, you would know it was a preview piece. The event was being set up, that was the point, to get people excited about coming out. It hadn`t started yet. Last year when I worked for KATU I was the only TV news reporter who covered it, and I was in a Polk County Sheriff's boat pacing the paddlers. Salem-News.com is only lightly supported by the local advertising community, we have people working 16 hours a day to make this happen on the smallest skeleton crew ever imagined. In fact, I would state that no media group in history has ever done so much with so little in the way of resources. Please try to appreciate that we did our best to promote the event. We love the dragon boat races, but we have a very small staff for video reports. We hope to be more involved next year, maybe the people that run the WBF will send more promotional material ahead of time; maybe they will try harder too. Tim King

Very Disappointed with the Salem news on the WBF. As a Dragon boat paddler, having only one sentence mentioning the races is very sad indeed. If it was such a featured event, why did the video consist of trains and empty tents? Bad reporting!

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