On route to the gaiety I saw a man shining up his ancient vehicle. Check out the wooden spokes.

And then lovely, hand-made zucchini signs informed you of all the important things like times and locations.

There were also signs peppered all over telling you important facts.

I got up very early because I knew the day began with the Pet Parade. People take their pets and decorate them to look like zucchinis and then parade them down a tiny, short street and prizes are given at the end. I couldn’t miss that. I got to meet some great beasties. First I met a dachshund who was totally rockin’ the look. It wasn’t hard for him, being all elongated-squash-shaped and all.

Then there was a goat, painted green, in a cage filled with leaves.

Large woman with tiny chihuahua? Check.

Herding dog with creepy blue eyes dressed as a zucchini flower? Check.

The dog’s name is Ellie, and she was lovely and super-psyched to be wearing a costume. You could almost hear her. “Look at me, I’m a flower! See me? Flower! Oh boy! Flower flower flower!” etc.

Cooper, I learned, loves to carry things in his mouth. So he carried his little identification sign around with him all day.

There was also a three-legged poodle…

…a baby goat…

…a half-corgie, half-irish setter wearing a old futon mattress…

…and two girls who are members of 4-H and brought some delightful companions with them, two of which were Pig-ccini and a lion-head rabbit. An award-winning lion-head rabbit, I’ll have you know.

There was also Stephanie the cat. Poor Stephanie. Clearly this was the backstory: a three-year-old boy told his parents that he wanted to be in the pet parade, in a wagon, with his beloved cat by his side. The parents, being high on crack or something, decided this would be a good idea. So Stephanie the cat was placed in a wagon adorned with antlers and a dried crocodile skull (you see them on the front there), had a leash put on her, and sat there while this young feller aggressively pet her. She so clearly did not want to be there, AT ALL. You know that night she barfed in each and every one of her owner’s shoes. And rightfully so, I would add. I would do the same thing had I been in her place. Hork away, Stephanie, hork away.

Leading the pet parade was the Master of Ceremonies, with his festive hat and his ornately-decorated golf cart and his bullhorn.

Once the parade was over, the fun was not done. Oh no. There were all these vendors selling things ( I bought Cricket a t-shirt and I bought myself zucchini relish and zucchini bread). Here’s a list of some of the other fun things they were doing.

The nice 4-H girls live with their parents on a farm, and aside from bringing the green goat in the cage, the pig and the rabbit, they set up a petting zoo with heirloom chickens, two geese, a flock of the sweetest sheep from Turkey, two ponies and my cow. I clearly called it “my” cow because I love this cow. Really. My favorite picture of the day is a girl with a skull painted on her face feeding my beloved cow. I want to live with this cow.

By the way, the MC was not the only person wearing a zucchini-themed hat. Ooooh no.

People were bringing their gigantic monster-zucchinis to be weighed and entered into a competition, and this guy, who reminded me of Alton Brown, was in charge of the weighing area.

I walked, I ate, I talked to people, I talked to their dogs, the whole thing was wonderful. I don’t know what my schedule holds for next year, but if I’m free, I’m going again. It’s a hoot.

Sashiko (???^?, literally “little stabs”) is a form of decorative reinforcement stitching (or functional embroidery) from Japan. Traditionally used to reinforce points of wear, or to repair worn places or tears with patches, this running stitch technique is often used for purely decorative purposes in quilting indigo blue cloth gives sashiko its distinctive appearance, though decorative items sometimes use red thread.

Here are some pictures of it from Flickr. I love geometric designs, especially hexagons, so this totally appeals to me.

Then, on Sunday I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival. There’s a park right next to my house, and every year in the first weekend in May, the large Japanese community in White Plains has this festival, with bands and food and cultural booths, etc. One of the things I like best about living in White Plains is the diversity. From what I can see, there is a large Asian contigent (Japanese, Chinese and Korean). There’s also quite a few black people who speak french (either from Haiti or the Ivory Coast or some place like that), and a ton of Hispanics, mostly Mexican. It is so, so much better than the town I grew up in, Rye (Barbara Bush’s home town!). It was almost all white, and 60% Catholic. No diversity at all. Very dull. Snore.

Anyway, Cherry Blossom Festival. Since the weather was so good, lots of people turned out for it. The park was packed. There was a whole bunch of booths with Japanese activities.

There was a tea ceremony booth, and a booth where you could fight small remote-controlled robots against other small, remote-controlled robots.

Then there was a kawaii band rockin’ it in the far corner.

And in the near corner, on the stage, were drummers. The adults were great, but the kids really took the cake.

And, of course, there was food. The octopus balls booth* had lovely decorations.

And there were lots of people wearing authentic garb.

It’s one of my favorite events in White Plains, and I’m glad I was in town this year to catch it.

*Chopped-up octopus, rolled into balls with batter and deep-fried. Anyone making cephalopod testicle jokes gets a virtual smack from me.

Addendum: Saw this bag on an 11-year-old-girl at the Festival. Only the Japanese could make a purse this cute and this macabre. They have a gift, I tell you.

The architecture was NUTS. It was like being in a fairy tale, with dragons and princesses and everything. My heart actually hurt a little.

Even our generic hotel couldn’t avoid the Grimm’s fairy tales vibe. This was the picture that was over my bed.

“In Czech Republic after woman has been defiled in the middle of the road she chops off man’s head. Enjoy your stay in Prague.”

Also in my hotel bathroom? This.

Beer Capital of the World, indeed.

The great thing about visiting a primarily Catholic country is that there are festivals and celebrations all the time. Every saint needs to be venerated in some way, so the main square usually has something going on. When we were there it was Easter. And the Renaissance Fair thing that Europe does so well (being that they had the Renaissance, of course) was out in force.

First, you see that church there, the white one with the greenish turrets? The Czech Republic is known for glass, specifically lead crystal glass, and they had a GORGEOUS chandelier in that church. My picture totally doesn’t do it justice.

Okay, back to the Easter festival. First of all, there is a clear color scheme for Easter in the Czech Republic, and that is yellow, green and orange. So everything was decorated in those colors.

There was also an eight-foot-tall easter egg made from twigs covered with those ribbons. And the best thing was people were taking pride in the crafts and traditions that they have been doing for centuries. There were people selling small glass and ceramic things and painted blown goose eggs and this forger? Pumping up the heat on his forging station with his foot, like a Singer sewing machine.

And then there was the food. For both Budapest and Prague, the food is pretty much the same. It’s stick-to-your-ribs, meat and potatoes stuff. There were people selling gingerbread cookies that they had decorated with fine lines of white glaze, and tons of sausages, and this baked good that I called a turtleneck because apparently vowels were in short supply the day they named this thing.

How it works: You wrap a strip of raw dough around a wooden dowel, and then the wooden dowel rotates over a roasty-toasty fire. I think they may sprinkle sugar on there too. Then, they slide it off the wooden dowel and you eat it. Along with this, there was what I considered the piece de resistance: The pig roasting on a spit.

I didn’t include a picture of the pig from the front because, frankly, it was kind of gross and wee bit barbaric-looking, but the cool thing was that it was run on wood. And when the roaster ran out of wood, he chopped some more. With that axe can see. Oh my God, it’s so medieval and authentic.

On one of the sides of the square is one of the hot sights in Prague, the astrological clock. I’m not really sure how it works, but it does work and it sure does look complicated.

At the top of each hour, one of the four figures next to the clock, Death, rings his bell and shakes his hourglass. And those two windows open and the twelve apostles swing by. It’s great. Here’s a close-up of Death.

The four figures around the clock are the most-hated things they could think of: Death, Greed, Vanity and a Turk. That’s a whole lotta hate for Turkey. I guess the Czech Republic did not particularly enjoy being ruled by Turkey when this clock was made.

But wait! This is not the only cool clock in Prague. Prague has one of the finest Jewish Quarters of any European city. That’s mainly because Hitler wanted to preserve it exactly as it was as a museum of an extinct race. So it is relatively untouched. In the Jewish Quarter there is a clock that runs backwards because it has hebrew letters on it.

The Jewish Quarter has the really cool cemetery as well. The Jews were allotted only a small amount of space to bury their dead, so it’s a really dense cemetery. Let me explain: when the Jews ran out of room, they put another layer of soil over the graves, moved the pre-existing gravestones up, and buried another group of people. In some places it is twelve people deep. The cemetery was in use from the 1500s to the end of the 1700s, so up to 100,000 people may be buried there.

Another thing about the Jewish Quarter is that throughout the ages, Jews have had to wear identifying garments when out and about with Christians. At one point it was a yellow sash. For a long time, it was a yellow pointed hat. The Jews took this hat and incorporated it into their architecture, so one can see it all over that part of town.

My mom and I partook in the local ethnic cuisine throughout our stay in both Prague and Budapest, and one of the places we ended up in was something between a mad scientist’s laboratory and Applebee’s. It was covered with alchemy symbols and gurgling, lit-up giant fake Bunsen burners and well, you can see for yourself.

And, in keeping with the Crapplebee’s design motif, they also had musical instruments on the wall. No skis or fake-o vintage team photos.

They served green beer. Really. Green beer. I don’t drink beer, but my mother does, so of course I forced the green beer on her. She said it tastes like ear wax, but more bitter. So as tempting as it might be, don’t drink the green beer.

and my personal favorite, mainly for the name: The Straw-Berried Treasure Cupcake.

The cute inspiration bug bit me again recently when I saw the submarine tea thingie.

That makes me so happy. I have loose tea that I use occasionally, I may end up purchasing this.

Also, on a more macabre but still cute note, how badly do I want this wallpaper? (Answer: really freakin’ badly).

I love animals. I love anatomy. I love black and gray. I want – nay, I NEED – this wallpaper.

In a totally non-movie-related news, Cricket mocked me for talking about a “twig district” in New York. There isn’t really a twig district, there’s a flower district, and one can procure many a twig or branch there. I took a picture of one shop to illustrate that.

That’s one of the things I truly love about New York, the districts. There’s the bead district, a restaurant district, the plastic district, a light bulb district, etc. And those are only the ones I know. Who knows what other wonderful clusters of shops New York holds?

The other thing I took a photo of is this gorgeous enclosed bridge that I walk by from time to time.

It’s like an enchanted world. It connects two dull buildings with its ornate coppery multi-levelness. I would love to walk across it one day. In the meantime, I can just walk past it and drool.

Addition: Lookit! Brain-sucker cupcakes! How fabulous!

http://www.bonchon.com/eng/

Okay, fine, you make life-alteringly delicious fried chicken. Why must you repeat that it is healthy and low-calorie? It’s FRIED CHICKEN. Do you remember when KFC had that horrendously written commercial campaign? It was the one where they said, “You know, if you strip the skin and breading off of our fried chicken, it’s really quite healthy,” and America, as a group, was like OH FOR REAL COME ON do not compare your processed fried chicken to a big bowl of dark green arugula and kale PLEASE KTHX. I’m having flashbacks of that with Bon Chon. Also, for engrish, it’s pretty stellar. Here are some quotes about the signature Bon Chon taste secret:

We use only vegetable oils to fry our chicken. Along with our special sauce, this process eliminates oil and water from the chicken so that it can create lean and crispy tastes. (OH FOR REAL COME ON, etc.)
The initial flavor of the fried chicken decelerates as the temperature cools down.
You hand remains almost free form our ingredient sauce.
Your fingers and hands should remain free from its sauce because the sauce and ingredients remain intact with the chicken.

This cracks me up, because now I want to tell people jokes and then yell a medication’s name after the punchline. “What do cats put in their drinks? Mice cubes. LEVITRA!!”

Now, on to cupcakes. I went to a lovely party on Saturday night for a girl I went to college with, her 30th birthday party. Lini, the birthday girl, is bringing back the 1950s house arts in a big way. She made a German chocolate cake with what I referred to as “aggressive frosting.” You know how most people attempt to make frosting as smooth and uniform as possible? Not Lini. Lini put smashed pecans and coconut shreds in it so it looked like it was furry and alive. It reminded me of that monster book from Harry Potter, like if I got to close to the cake teeth would just SPRING OUT from nowhere and there would be snarling and gnashing and whatnot. I swear it heard it growling. But it was delish, so whatever. Anyway, Lini and I were talking about how much we love cake decorating shows because, hey, they’re decorating something. And then you get to eat it! And in addition to the German chocolate cake, we had cupcakes, which inspired me to share some really gorgeous cupcake designs with y’all.

And my personal favorite, because it reminds me of my childhood:

This is the lake from our hotel room. The area is heavily peppered with hotels and motels, apparently the population goes from about 1,000 to 15,000 in the summer. Ergo, many hotels.

And the stores/restaurants/amusements are charming and quaint and delightful. I took some pictures of the more dated and adorable elements.

You can’t really appreciate it because I was zipping past it in a car, but off to the left of that shot is a wax museum. You can see a bit of it.

And this is supposedly the oldest minigolf course in… someplace, maybe the Adirondacks, maybe New York, something like that.

And I couldn’t get a shot of it, but there is a Tiki Resort right near the minigolf course.

The town just screams, “No one puts Baby in a corner!”

So, the wedding. It was lovely, except for some poor teenage boy who had to read a passage from the Song of Songs that was clearly written with a woman’s voice, so Poor Teenage Boy had to read this whole passage:

Listen! My lover!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains,
bounding over the hills.

My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.

My lover spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, and come with me.”

Okay, first of all, if I was a socially awkward male heterosexual teenager, this would be torture for me. Second, every time he said, “lover,” how was I not supposed to think of that Saturday Night Live skit? I mean, really. Then the next kid got up for a reading and said it was St. Paul speaking to the Phillipinos. I found that endlessly amusing as well.

The rest of the wedding went smashingly, C. looked gorgeous, and everyone went outside and posed for photos while actively freezing to death.

We all shuttled to a lovely castle on the side of a mountain, where there was dancing and consuming of food and beverage until late into the night.

The best part of dinner was that it was a buffet, so there weren’t herds of waiters tromping around with large trays of food, passive-aggressively deciding when dancing was to cease (“Well, you can keep dancing, but you’re food will get cold. I’m just sayin’…”). You could get what you wanted when you wanted. And they also brought out The Meat.

It took two people to carry it out. It reminded me of those ribs that Fred Flintstone gets and they put it in his car and his car tips over. It was enormous. Really.

Here are children in awe of The Meat. Or perhaps they got sucked into it’s gravitational pull. Can’t be sure.

And then the wedding ended and we went back to the hotel for the afterparty. Here is the beautiful blushing bride playing beer pong with one of the groomsmen, Ham.

It was a lovely wedding experience all around. I went to bed about 1:30 a.m. because I am weak and frail, but from what I understand, the revelry didn’t end until way after the sun came up.

Addendum: Apparently, at 3:00 a.m., C.’s 80-year-old grandma played beer pong as well… with scotch. Gramma is hard-core.

Did you see that gingerbread house with the red birds? OMG, that is so very awesome.

2. There’s an artist/graphic designer who goes by the name Lunchbreath. He designs some really stellar infographics and charts. Some of them have rough language, but they are very clever and very funny and you need to see them. Right now, in fact. He also has terrific handwriting, very distinctive and charming. Here’s his flickr stream where you can peruse his entire graphic collection: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunchbreath/

Also, in a totally unrelated note, I have tried Pinkberry for the first time this afternoon and it is yummy-nummy. I like the bacterial tang of yogurt, so that is a lovely change from regular frozen yogurt. I would recommend what I had, regular flavor with little yogurt chips (like the coating on yogurt-covered raisins). Dee-lishious. I don’t think I’ll become addicted or anything, but I can understand why others have become so. I think the fact that small is five bucks is definitely going to prevent me from making this a habit. But it is a pleasant treat every once in a blue moon.

I’m working on a ton of projects right now, so I’ll be telling you about those as they develop. Some graphic design, some logo design, some jewelry design, whooo, it’s a busy life. I shall keep you posted.