Photos.

Strawberry Fair

It's warm and sunny here now, which means people are out in huge numbers, and it's festival time. The last weekend in May, we went to the Cambridge Beer Festival. I don't have pictures of that, as I thought it unwise to mix alcohol tasting and my expensive camera. We had a good time though; I tried ciders and Dave tried beers and we met up with a bunch of people he works with and chatted loudly and mostly coherently.

This past weekend was the Strawberry Fair. It was held on Midsummer Common, which is right next to our house, so we had to go and check it out. It calls itself a "music, entertainment, and arts and crafts" festival. No mention of actual strawberries, although I managed to find one small card table with some guys selling some, in this mess:

That's only the corner of it that you could see from our window.
Most of the booths were food, handmade jewelry, hemp and hand-dyed clothing, loud hats, alternative medicine/herbal remedies, or political lobbyists. There was an abundance of goths, hippies, scenesters, dreadlocks, dyed hair, and scantily clad people of both sexes.
The fair opened with a parade from the common to downtown and back. I followed them around for a bit with my camera, both because there were some interesting costumes, and because parades are a good place to take pictures of random people where they don't think you're creepy and/or yell at you for it.
The theme of this year's parade was "bugs" and this is roughly how it went:

The front of the parade. One of these two didn't try very hard with her costume.

Next was this lady, who was dancing up a storm every time they had to stop for traffic. She was great



Then there was a big block of drummers, various samba bands I think, who kept up the beat for the entire hour-long parade, and then spent the rest of the day wandering around the fair drumming. Now that's stamina.




Behind the drummers were the people with complicated, large papier-mache costumes.
A praying mantis:

Scorpion:

And spider:


Next came some kids in bug costumes:

and some local circus performers:




There were people acccompanying the parade on all sides and watching for traffic. Most of them hadn't dressed up nearly this much, if at all:


Near the back were a bunch of teenage girls, mostly dressed as butterflies, although there was a bee and a snail in there too.





After that it sort of trailed off with a bunch of dancers, who weren't wearing costumes, and the people who couldn't keep up.

The rest of the fair day was really busy, loud and hot. Dave and I both got sunburnt. Thankfully we were able to retreat to the relative coolness of our apartment, and still watch and hear the goings on from there. Also, they only just finished cleaning up all the garbage that was left on the common yesterday.

posted by Sian at 11:42 AM