Nations: gotta catch'em all!

We went to the Festival of Nations today, part of the slow exploration of our new home that K and I have undertaken. It was frankly disappointing. I'll be honest, it can take a lot for this type of festival to satisfy me. I enjoyed it, yeah, but I won't go back next year. Mostly because of the food.

Food is a crucial piece of any gathering as well as an immediate cultural identifier. A well-read or well-fed man could say that food is magic. Kirke turned Odysseus's crew into pigs with her meal; Andhrimnir cooks a feast every night for the heroes of Valhalla. Half of the reason to go to the Festival of Nations was the thirty-four food vendors, from German on one side to Brazilian on the other. Everyone knew that.

Which is why the crowd along the row of food tents was near impenetrable. Most of the time you couldn't see a menu without fighting through the lines. We managed to get some kabobs from Greece-tent and feijoada from Brazil-tent before giving up on getting anything else from the gauntlet. At three in the afternoon of the last day, when hawkers were crossing items off their menus because they had run out of food, the lines were as long at every one of the food sellers as we had seen them. There was no slackening of interest or appetite, no one rushing to the music stages or joining the circle-dancing hippies. The crowd actually seemed to grow as time went on, mocking us. They might as well have turned to us and said, "We're getting a Romanian dessert and you're not. Also, we bought all the beer at the drink tent, all they have left is Diet Coke. Chump."

I'm convinced that the crowd can be beaten. If you started early Saturday, I'm sure by Sunday afternoon you could try something from each of the sellers. Move from one line to the next, methodical, patient, inexorable, and you'll eat your way from Belize to Bosnia and Eritrea to Ethiopia. Look, not many cuisines started with E. The point is you could work your way through the food booths. And I bet that after three or four booths, the magic starts to wear off. You'd be spending as much time in line as you would eating. People who know me may not realize that I consider "completing a set" to be a holy act, but even I would grow restless working that much just to eat something wrapped in goddamn grape leaves.

The rest of the festival was dominated by textiles. Nearly everyone was selling clothes and not much else. There was a highland contingent throwing sheafs and cabers but you can't spend an entire afternoon watching bags of straw get thrown over a pole. There was an ebru painter, which was actually mesmerizing. That's exactly the kind of thing I want to watch for hours, and would have if the crowd hadn't been so thick. No shit, it's like they grabbed some flan and just followed us around the park.

We had to stop for ice cream on the way home. Had to. I almost got whiplash when I saw the sign. The logo isn't quite the same, but it's close.