Fete de Marquette, Interrupted

 

Today Travalon and I went to the church near our house, which is a long story I may blog about soon. Then we went to Lake Kegonsa State Park and hiked through the woods for an hour and along the lakeshore for another quarter of an hour. That got us plenty of exercise, but we thought maybe we would check out the Fete de Marquette back in town, because hopefully the West African food cart would be there with the baobab shakes. That would be so refreshing after a long, hot hike!

We found a really good parking spot and walked to the Fete, but there was no sign of the West African food cart. Lots of other carts were there, so I got a virgin pina colada, and Travalon had a Thai iced tea. Then he bought a T-shirt of yaks in Nepal (it's very cute), while I bought a Tibetan singing bowl. It took me a while to find one that I could make sing myself - I'm not as good at it as the seller is. Back home I was able to make it sing, but not like he could. Maybe if I become proficient, I'll post a video. We had wanted to watch a zydeco band, but the seats were right in the sun, so Travalon got our lawn chairs from the car, and we sat in the shade of the building with the bathrooms, behind the stage. As Travalon said, "We want to hear the band. We don't need to see them." Maybe people thought we were nuts at first, but hey, we weren't getting sunstroke, and soon some other people settled around us. Then suddenly the railroad gates started clanging and came down, so we wondered if a train was going to interrupt the Fete. The tracks run right through the park where it was going on. I got my cell phone into position, but instead it was a parade of two railroad maintenance vehicles, loudly tooting their horns. In the background you can kind of hear the zydeco band gamely playing over the cacophony.

As the name implies, Fete de Marquette is a French festival, and it seemed a little more French than Bastille Days, at least music-wise. The vendors were all over the map, Tibet and Nepal and Central America, for example. There was a small Eiffel Tower, but it was not inflatable. We saw there was another zydeco band playing at seven, but we didn't want to stick around that long, so we went to the Bear and Bottle, a restaurant up in our area with a lovely patio. The hostess told us to sit anywhere, so we sat on the patio, but nobody came to take our order. Worse, another younger, hipper couple sat down a bit after us, and a waitress came right away to take their order. We decided we would give it ten minutes, but with a couple of minutes to spare, another waitress came and apologized profusely and told us we could have drinks on the house. I had a banana mai tai and Travalon had the alcoholic coconut limeade we had remembered so fondly, and our food came quickly, so it did work out. Then when we got home, there was time to play a little tennis, but I was even more terrible than usual because I was so tired already - usually we play on a weekday, when I've been sitting most of the day. The ball kept ending up outside the court, either over or under the fence, and it was always my fault so I was the one who had to go fetch it. However, we "sported" for a quarter of an hour according to my FitBit, so that's some more exercise. By the time I did DuoLingo, I was exhausted. This was totally my mood:

I kept getting this sentence wrong, so I sure didn't feel like I needed to learn anything else! Of course, it's Irish syntax, so the translation is really more like, "It needs not on me any thing else to learn." Coming from a Romance language background, I have found Irish syntax to be really out there, but then they probably think ours makes no sense either. In case you are wondering how to pronounce it, it's something like "Nee hastyon oo-aim ayon rood ella a oh-lam." But that's an approximation.

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