52nd City

Fest, Fest, and Fest Some More

One of the things I love about St. Louis is the spazz-out at the end of August, where suddenly, there's a festival almost every day - it almost seems like a collective reluctance to let summer go. (Which as a person who never acclimated to the cold, even though I grew up in a climate with four distinct seasons, I can appreciate.) I was at the Festival of Nations on Sunday, and was really pleased to see the park crammed with people, eating tibs wat and burek and boat drinks (served in hollowed-out coconuts) and watching Farshid Etniko play Persian music. If you stood in the shade, the temperature was absolutely pleasant; I couldn't quite muster the fortitude to go last year because it was a skull-splitting 100 degrees. (Even us heat-loving maniacs have our thresholds.)

Now, the finale comes over Labor Day weekend, with the Japanese Festival at MoBot, the St. Nicholas Greek Festival in the West End and the Big Muddy Blues Festival on the Landing. There's probably a baseball game in there somewhere, too. I remember hitting every single one of these things the first summer I moved here, in '01, on the freakin' bus. I don't know how I did it, but I remember dashing across Forest Park to catch a MetroLink downtown and feeling a little dizzy because it was, once again, about 99 or 100 degrees outside. In fact, right before my last bus ride home, standing at the bus stop near the old Busch Stadium, I spied a hot and weary Fredbird, leaning over the balcony, trying to get some air in that beak as fireworks exploded and black smoke hung in the air. Ah, good times, good times. Well, maybe not for Fredbird on that particular day. Now that I'm a lazy girl with a car, it seems almost incomprehensible to me that I managed to do so much without wheels, but Father Time is a public-transit traveling festival-goer year-round; in fact, I have no doubts that he's probably on Metro's site, plotting his route for Labor Day weekend.