Festival Weekend

Saturday we had two festivals to go to. The first was Greene Village Day. Just something for local organizations and vendors to set up booths with a few displays of this and that, and a bunch of things mainly geared towards kids. There was also a parade, but we started out too late to see that. I did pick up a Greene t-shirt. Showing support for the locals through participation and purchase. We also gave some money to a cat group.

Next we went over next door to Lewiston and found the Greek Festival. The live music and dancing are only in the evenings, so we were disappointed about that. Carrie got some lamb kebob for lunch and a loaf of apricot almond bread for later. I enjoyed going into the church and reading their comics. The image to the left (note the word balloons) came off their pocket calendar.

In between, we did stop at a few yard sales. I got a hutch to put on the second computer desk. Our puppet population has been booming and now there is more storage/display space for them. Unfortunately, Neil the Horse's spot on the wall is now covered. I did some rearranging of pictures, but he still can't fit in the computer room any more. Now he's in the bedroom. Moving him also prompted us to do some more picture hanging and we have the bedroom now mostly covered along with a couple of things in Kemmer's room and a few other places around the house.

But that was on Sunday. After the two festivals on Saturday we still had plenty of time so did a little more exploring of the area. Carrie brought me to an antique store she'd found earlier. We're going back with trade items for sure. And we also tried out a couple of parks. The riverside one, with an old converted to pedestrian use railroad bridge was best. We'll be going back to that also.

Folk in the Eyes

Last Weekend we went to the annual Bangor Folk Festival and listened to lots of music. An oud player, a Korean drumming group, a couple of Celtic groups. The Quebecois style of Vent du Nord appealed to us enough that Carrie bought one of their cds. Note in the clip above that the guy in the middle is doing the percussion.

Folk Off

Last weekend was Bangor's American Folk Festival and we went! We planned on going Saturday, but it was such a rainy day we figured it wasn't worth the drive. Fortunately, Carrie also had Sunday off, so that's when we went.

The music acts were starting at noon, but we arrived earlier than that, so looked around the vendor tents a bit. Nothing too exciting, though Carrie did buy a couple of things.

The first act we went to was Nikolay Kolev, who played Bulgarian music on his gadulka. It was interesting enough that we wanted to see him perform with the rest of his group, Bulgarika. We walked over to the stage they would be on fairly soon afterwards and caught the tail end of French Vocal Traditions and Carrie heard her first Acadian music. Kind of like Cajun Celtic. We both like it. Bulgarika had a huge crowd and when they got going they really rocked the house!

After that we meandered off to the far end of the area to the Children's Stage (there were six stages total, so you know there was a lot of music going on here!) We caught three acts here, Gene Tagaban, One Crazy Raven, pictured above, was a Native American story-teller. His picture, dressed in Tlingit Raven garb, was on the show t-shirts and programs, and certainly caught Carrie's eye.

Also on this stage were Music From China, an ensemble that played, well, music from China. And they interacted with the children in the audience as often as they could. And the last group we watched here was Andes Manta. They had about three dozen different instruments that they kept switching around on while they played music from the Andes Mountain region. One guy was extraordinarily speedy on his little guitar. Check him out on this clip. And, no, I did not speed it up at all.

We left them a little early to go see the India dance troup featuring Mythili Prakash, but unless you were in the front row, a lot of what they did was completely lost behind audience members' heads.

Still, it was a fun day and we intend to go back next year.