A Face In The Crowd

I got Anne out on the bicycle today. She was still laid low from her cold on Friday, so this Friday off together was not as much fun as the last one was. I got out on the bike yesterday, but it just wasn’t the same without her. Today, we rode over to Tower Grove Park for its big festival of the year, The Festival of Nations. As you can tell from the photo, there were thousands of people there. There were hundreds of booths too, representing many of the world’s nations. We regularly attend this festival, but I noticed something new this year, in addition to nation-states various ethnicities were also there.

The main draw for me is the food. We started off with Vietnamese pork pot stickers. They were very good. I could have gone for a second round of them. Next up, was a sort of baklava confection from Kurdistan, but instead of normal filo dough, it used something that seemed like shredded wheat. It too was good. I now know how much sweet syrup to put on my next bowl of Shredded Wheat to make it taste good. We rounded things out with two orders of Columbian arapas, one chicken, the other vegetarian, which were kind of meh, except for the salsa that came with them. We also got lemonade with mangos there, which were to die for. I’ll have to try to make some for myself. We took in more than food from the represented cultures. The festival had multiple stages performing simultaneously and in-between bouts of eating, we caught a few acts. On the way out, we saw Bobby at the Model UN booth. She gave us a little bit more intel on Dan’s big party at the house.

A final note about the traffic. It was horrible. Even on a normal Saturday, there is a lot of traffic around Tower Grove, but today it was just insane. Lucky for us, we were on our bicycles and were able to take full advantage of the dedicated bicycle lane running up Tower Grove Avenue. Much of the street was just a parking lot that we just breezed on by.