Saturday morning Anne and I went for a walk.  We walked through a neighborhood in Clayton, that we had lived in when we first moved to Saint Louis.  Anne coined the phrase Pooh-o-pedia, when after a moment of explaining some fauna or flower, I called her on it.  So dear friends whenever you are out and walking about, and you need to know something, just ask the Pooh-o-pedia.  We walked as far as the Park and saw more flowers and fauna.  I photographed this cute little yellow bird, but I couldn’t get it to turn and face us, so he didn’t make today’s post.  Today’s acorn header is from this walk.  On the way back home, we stopped at My Daddy’s Cheesecake for an eggs and omelet breakfast.

After a brief period of downtime, we turned around and launched again towards the Park.  This time though we were on bikes.  Passing the fish ponds, I got some good pictures of the Great White Egret, pictured above, in the act of eating a crayfish.  Yummy!  If you look at his neck, I don’t think that the crayfish in his mouth, was his first.

I also got the picture to the left of a Great Blue Heron, standing on one leg.  I think that he is a juvenile.  We continued on through the Park and exited on Clayton Avenue, by Barnes Hospital.  We turned right on to Tower Grove and wound our way over to Tower Grove Park, the sight of this year’s International Festival.

The weather this Saturday was a perfect, quite an improvement over last years Sweat Louis International Festival’s weather.  Consequently, the festival was way more crowded then last years.  As you might expect at an international festival, the crowd was quite diverse.  We didn’t have any trouble finding a parking space for our two bikes; we just locked them to a lamppost.  We caught the end of the Polynesian Dancers act on the main stage.  Afterwards we toured the booths selling souvenirs.  Many countries were represented more then once.

After that it was time to get down to the real business of the International Festival, food.  Our first menu item was a pair of Eaprakh, from the Kurdish booth.  Eaprakh is a leaf wrapped, spicy rice filled appetizer that you eat with your fingers.  Next up was lemongrass chicken, from the Vietnamese booth, your basic meat on a stick.  Finally, we had Sambusa, a dough wrapped, lentil filled, fried turnover type thing from the Ethiopian booth.  The crowds were starting to get to us about this time so we headed back to the main stage and watched the Mexican Dancers until it was time to go.  It was starting to get warm on the return ride and the red faced Pooh-o-meter was reading the heat by the time we got back home.  We got seventeen miles.

The day was not done though.  We had a dinner party to go to on Saturday night.  We went out to West County to Don and DJ’s house.  Well after getting lost and making a few cell phone calls we did.  Rob and Edie and Dennis rounded out the party.  Don mentioned that part of the occasion for the party was to celebrate Anne’s birthday, but Anne reminded him that they already had in New York City.  Not to worry though, Edie’s birthday was just last week.  The food was great and so was the company.