Foxwoods Resort Casino to Honor Ancient Chinese Tradition at Dragon Boat Festival in NY
This weekend, one of the elaborate Dragon Boats in the 2012 Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival in New York will be sponsored by Foxwoods Resort Casino.
At the multi-cultural festival—the largest of its kind in the U.S.—competitors will paddle the brightly colored canoes, complete with dragon heads and tails, across Meadow Lake in Queens. The 22nd annual festival takes place Saturday, August 4 and Sunday, August 5; it is free to attend. The festival will feature the New York Dragon Boat Championships and the U.S. Dragon Boat Open Championship Races in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, home of the 1964 World's Fair.
The Dragon Boat Festival is commemorated each year on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. Four days before the festival begins, the dragon boats are taken from their resting places and their heads and tails attached. They are then ritually blessed by a Buddhist monk and later brought to life before the races by having their eyes dotted in red paint.
This year, the festival will play host to more than 170 teams, encompassing more than 2,000 crew members from across America and Canada.
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The festival will additionally feature two days of multi-cultural performances before an expected 60,000 spectators.
Foxwoods will have a display at the Flushing Meadows Corona Park, where guests will receive Foxwoods promotional offers, and attendees will have the chance to spin a wheel for additional prizes at the Foxwoods festival tent.
In a press release, Foxwoods noted that, in their ongoing efforts to offer an unrivaled experience to multicultural clientele, the casino continues to provide personalized service via multilingual staff, authentic Asian cuisine, unmatched ethnic events and promotions, like the September 9 performance of the Kung Fu String Girls Band, and its new Foxwoods Rewards Program.
