Denver, CO

This weekend in Denver saw thousands of people gathering together at the Civic Center Park to celebrate Cinco De Mayo. If you didn’t get to experience and enjoy the festival in person, here’s an overview from my six hours spent in the sun and fun on Saturday May 3rd:

The Cinco De Mayo had a taste of everything: from regular carnival food like hot dogs, to Greek cuisine on Gyros, Chinese food, Mexican food, and plenty of desserts. Hardly a mouth was dry either; there was plenty of beer and margarita stands all around. I just had water because I do not drink for personal reasons

Food is pretty important to me so it figures I’d type that up first. But what else? Activities:

Fun for the whole family was highlighted by bouncey houses, train rides, and a petting zoo for the kids and the more adventurous and carefree adults.
The sound of music could be heard from every corner, and depending on where you were standing you’d be listening to one of a number of radio stations present (including 92.5 the Wolf and a new radio station for hip-hop 107.1) or one of the two stages playing live music from various bands and artists. The most entertaining was a young kid - he couldn’t have been more than 9 years old - playing on an entire drum set! This kid could drum!

Information tables: Sponsors and vendors had tents set up throughout the park, displaying their goods and services. Some of the tents were full of culturally related items but much more, to my disappointment, were booths just selling stuff and contributing to the commercialization of this country and overall U.S. culture, to the point where commercialization has even started to take over our holidays.

Dancing: You could watch dancing or join in and dance. There were traditional Mexican and Aztec dancers (and drummers) and both shows drew out some large camera-happy crowds. I really enjoyed watching the beautiful, and mesmerizing, movements of this traditional art form, and found the tourist trigger happy cameramen and camerawomen quite amusing. We love to take pictures, don’t we?

Speaking of pictures: if I can figure out how to work this scanner, I’ll upload the one picture I have from my day at the Cinco De Mayo festivities. So if you see me in a sombrero and holding a guitar with a stuffed animal donkey on my knee, you’ll know where I was. And if you see the attractive girl sitting next to me with a pink sombrero, then you’ll know who my girlfriend is- Ashley.
And if you ask me I’ll tell you the picture was her idea and she forced me to go through with it!! (but call me on that and I’ll be forced to admit that the picture was a result of my own idea and several minutes of careful persuasion to get Ashley to agree)