Water Festival

The third weekend of July every year, this little town explodes in a pandemonium of market stalls, carnival rides, and drunk people. The entirety of downtown is covered in music, the different genres and styles competing for attention. The opening of the festival is on Thursday evening and the festival ends with a ginormous fireworks display on midnight Sunday.

This town is usually a pretty quiet town. Nothing too exciting happens ever, the monthly fair and flea markets included. We have maybe three major happenings per year, market only by the arrival of carnival rides - The Troll Days, The Fall Fair, and the Water Festival. The last one is in a league of its own.

Boy and I avoid this spectacle with the stubborn tenacity of a bumblebee head-butting a window.

I used to enjoy the festival when I was younger. When the whole family would walk around the stalls, watch the runners in the foot races, and eat ice cream and cotton candy in one of the parks. As I grew older, though, I became more and more intimidated by crowds and the leering and harsh words of drunk strangers.

One year I went with some friends from school, but after losing money to a thief and being left alone to wait by an unnesserily loud and spinny carnival ride my friends found especially enticing, I decided to not go again. The magic of the festival was lost, hidden among the clinkity-clang of machines, the stench of vomit, and the grabby hands of strangers. It took years before I even sat foot near the festival area again.

Last year had a good chance of redeeming the festival for me.
Boy and I met up with his mother and her SO, and we sat on a couch outside a cafe by the pier and watched the sun set over the river and behind the hills. It was a warm evning and the beer tent a little bit down the pie was playing rock music. People were passing back and forth in front of the cafe and everyone was smiling or laughing. I felt the magic slowly crawl out from under that huge pile of disappointment and broken dreams.

The next day I went to get some langos and I was forced to hold tightly on to the illusion. The line was ridiculously long, the baker was rude, and the prices would have made Alexander Lucas flinch. I got back home with two sad looking former langos with sourcream and vowed to avoid anything that has anything to do with the Water Festival.

Except blue cotton candy, because blue cotton candy is magical.