derien | The Faire (Reply)

Sunday we had a small semi-redux of Saturday's breakfast, leaving room for fair food, because you just know that when you go to a fair you are going to eat all sorts of things you never normally would. (Also, we had only like two potatoes and no eggs left, so we couldn't really do the all-out version.) Then we scrambled around getting into the bits of costume that we were going to wear in the car, packing clothing to change into for the drive home, making last minute adjustment to the costumes. Cyberquail kindly continued to build parts of my costume in the car, as I'd taken a sudden notion that it didn't make sense for me to be running around with my head uncovered at a medieval faire - not period! But then taking into account the rest of my costume, I don't know why I got the notion that one little detail ought to be period. Still, I think the veil thingy she arranged for me looked very nice, I was delighted with it. :)

Oh, but I had realized Friday night that I had forgotten my chainemaille skirt - *pouts mightily!* I was so upset about that. I'd been looking forward to showing off

eor's handiwork and matching

cyberquail while we walked around. She looked lovely in hers, and drew admiring and covetous glances from many passing females. :)

Immediately upon entering we stopped for a few moments at the falconry demonstration, but soon moved on, realizing that we would never get to see everything if we stood still. Really, we probably didn't get to see near everything, it's a huge fairground. Right away we happened upon those vile gustatory temptations that we'd prepared for, a spread of fair food the like of which I had never before encountered. Funnel cake! (Fried dough shaped like worms so that there's as much friend surface area as possible, covered with powdered sugar and topped with cherries in sauce, slices of apples in sauce, or custard - or in my case, all three.:) ) Scotch eggs! (Have you ever had them? They're a hard-boiled egg, wrapped in sausage, fried, served on ... well, I suppose I should call them chips, but you know. What we call french fries. Scotch eggs are truly killer like OMG artery hardening death in a cardboard basket killer.)

We saw acrobats (though not as close as I might have liked), jousting, Axel the Sot (a sort of medieval style standup comedian, very crass, which makes me think he's probably pretty period, in spirit), and a demonstration of glass-blowing. There was live music, but I avoided it - something about it didn't sound right to me, beyond the fact that it was amplified. James wanted to watch it, and I felt bad and probably should have encouraged him to go do so if that was what he wanted. Also, you could get a beer and walk around with it, which is something I just cannot resist - it's very exotic to me, having grown up in Maine where it's totally verboten to take any sort of alcohol and walk around outdoors with it. (If you're very lucky a bar may have an outdoor area, but you'd damned well better stay within it's bounds.) (Unlucky that on Sundays they only allowed beer/ale, not wine - confusing to me, since in Maine beer and wine are the same category, but unlucky because of course beer is not so good for me or Eor, but I drank it anyway because... getting to walk around with beer! Eor did not.)

Cyberquail had a leather mug for her ale, which I coveted, and James kindly suggested that we needed leather mugs of our own. Innnnnncredibly expensive, I thought, given the materials - leather, a disk of wood, lined with wax. But SO COOL. I totally love mine!

Cyberquail also had a leather (lined with plastic) drinking skin, filled with lime water, which was a truly wonderful thing, saving me from complete dehydration. Lime water is a good thing.

And then we went home and ate MORE -

cyberquail had set up a Goan pork curry and it had been bubbling away in a crockpot all day. We ground up lentils in a little coffee-grinder to thicken the juice to a more sauce-like consistency, and it was very, very good. And we watched Monty Python's Holy Grail, which Eor has always resisted seeing, previously, and I think he actually chuckled a few times. :) (He's always been resistant to seeing any Monty Python movies, at least partly because his friends overquoted everything to him a bazillion times and he was sick of it. I've always thought that it seemed like his type of sense of humor and hoped to get him to watch Life of Brian.)

That kept us up until midnight...

...and we got up at 4:30am to start the long drive home.