NW Folklife Festival or what to do with a Saturday!?

I paid $11 for parking. I'm not ashamed of it... I'm not. Really. It kept me from driving around for HOURS, second guessing myself about missed spots, AND it gave me more time with Lisa. $11 well spent.

The first thing we did was walk around the Seattle Center looking at all the stuff there was to see. Sampling free things and taking in the smells at all sorts of varieties of food. (Deep fried calimari, the newest fair/ festival treat!) Lisa and I had Dicks BBQ for dinner (good stuff, based in Bellevue) and had a Shiscaberry (sp!) for dessert. (Strawberrys on a stick covered in chocolate)

I wanted to have a funnel cake as well as some strawberry shortcake, but I couldn't find a time to eat that much food. That and Lisa promised to make me some Strawberry Shortcake sometime.

In the before and after eating Lisa and I watched and participated in various things. We watched some Arabic dancing/ Arabic music, then we learned how to waltz with 250 of our closest friends. (While the Garfield HS Orchestra played Waltzes.) However the spinning made my quite dizzy and I had to stop. Something we will have to practice again sometime. Then we waited around for my roomy next year's band (From Here to There) to play, only to realize that future roomie was leaving at 6am for Texas and that he wasn't there. So we left.

It was quite interesting the people that showed up at the Festival that weren't scheduled events. Everything from "Advice for a $1" signs (with kids in HS holding them up) to dancing fiddle players (also HSers) to Politcal stuff ("Impeach Bush!" (because it worked on Clinton! =P )) and voting to street jugglers who did wild things with Hackey Sacks. It was fun and wild. I felt a bit out of place by the number of people wearing dred-locks in their hair. Had I known I might have dreded mine that day.

An interesting mixture of people, food, and events to be sure. However, I can't say as I expected anything less from Seattle.

~B.