We had been meaning to go out somewhere for quite some time now, what with the weekdays being all drab and monotonous. Sis suggested that we go visit the San Diego county fair by the ocean. Now, I have visited my share of fairs in India. We were regular visitors to "Great India Annual Consumer Fair", "Megha India Consumer Exhibition" and "Punjab-Haryana Handloom Fair" in our childhood. Most of these visits were forced upon sis and me due to our lack of assertiveness and we sort of had to go along with whatever Mom and Dad decided(works the other way round nowadays). In those days, Mom used to gleefully make the choices, and we three used to go along as unsuspecting gudgeons.
The "Great India Annual Consumer Fair" would usually arrive every six months in the exhibition grounds near the railway station in Bangalore. Whole Rajasthani families would stand around trying to woo customers to buy things like scented safety pins, two-foot-long pencils and the like. We had no intention of buying anything, but nevertheless went into every stall for Mom to check out every item. Dinner used to be papads the size of a small helipad and "Mewad strawberry icecreams". Oh no, disasters by any yardstick.
Megha India Consumer Exhibitions notched all-time highs on my favourites chart. Since it was an exhibition, they used to display many household 'innovations'. Inventions like automatic-rangoli-makers, talking water bottles etcetra etcetra filled the stalls. Sis and me stood around giggling, watching Mom listening with rapt concentration to a guy trying to sell her some 'headache relieving chappals', 'better memory bracelets for your children', so on and so forth. The high point was the rides - they had rides featuring rusty and sandblasted helicopters and trains. Today, merely looking at them would give me a septic and gangrenous wound - I wonder how Dad even let me get on to them.
The Punjab-Haryana Handloom fairs used to be Mom's favorites until she purchased some decorative cotton bedspreads with 'one-year guarantee, Madam!!'. One spin through the dryer and the bedspreads went back to being just bales of cotton. We haven't visited that particular fair since then. Sis and me, we hardly missed that fair since all we kids used to purchase from there were handkerchiefs. But believe me, the boards of that exhibition make me grin even to this day.
I am, by birth, averse to looking at stalls filled with bedspreads and animal-oils-with-therapeutic-values, hence I was not too keen to visit the San Diego fair, but what a loss it would have been, had I stuck on to pre-conceived notions about fairs! Stalls selling exotic food dotted the landscape. There were foods like deep-fried bread pudding, deep-fried ice cream, deep-fried cakes and Australian battered potatoes that I was seeing(and tasting) for the first time. The high-point of the show was the hypnosis show by Mark Yuzuik. Laughed and laughed for one full hour. Wonderful show that was. I had forgotten to take my jacket from home(after all, who wears a jacket in summer, right!!), but, in a bursts of bravado, boasted that I was used to much colder weather routinely. I spent half the evening shivering silently in my flimsy t-shirt. I thoroughly enjoyed the fair, except for that I could not go bungee jumping, tattoo my arm or get my ear pierced(all thwarted by familial pressures). Sigh. Next time, I should go alone.
That was a perfect beginning to the weekend, and I hope to do more 'posty' stuff the rest of the weekend. Stay tuned.
The "Great India Annual Consumer Fair" would usually arrive every six months in the exhibition grounds near the railway station in Bangalore. Whole Rajasthani families would stand around trying to woo customers to buy things like scented safety pins, two-foot-long pencils and the like. We had no intention of buying anything, but nevertheless went into every stall for Mom to check out every item. Dinner used to be papads the size of a small helipad and "Mewad strawberry icecreams". Oh no, disasters by any yardstick.
Megha India Consumer Exhibitions notched all-time highs on my favourites chart. Since it was an exhibition, they used to display many household 'innovations'. Inventions like automatic-rangoli-makers, talking water bottles etcetra etcetra filled the stalls. Sis and me stood around giggling, watching Mom listening with rapt concentration to a guy trying to sell her some 'headache relieving chappals', 'better memory bracelets for your children', so on and so forth. The high point was the rides - they had rides featuring rusty and sandblasted helicopters and trains. Today, merely looking at them would give me a septic and gangrenous wound - I wonder how Dad even let me get on to them.
The Punjab-Haryana Handloom fairs used to be Mom's favorites until she purchased some decorative cotton bedspreads with 'one-year guarantee, Madam!!'. One spin through the dryer and the bedspreads went back to being just bales of cotton. We haven't visited that particular fair since then. Sis and me, we hardly missed that fair since all we kids used to purchase from there were handkerchiefs. But believe me, the boards of that exhibition make me grin even to this day.
I am, by birth, averse to looking at stalls filled with bedspreads and animal-oils-with-therapeutic-values, hence I was not too keen to visit the San Diego fair, but what a loss it would have been, had I stuck on to pre-conceived notions about fairs! Stalls selling exotic food dotted the landscape. There were foods like deep-fried bread pudding, deep-fried ice cream, deep-fried cakes and Australian battered potatoes that I was seeing(and tasting) for the first time. The high-point of the show was the hypnosis show by Mark Yuzuik. Laughed and laughed for one full hour. Wonderful show that was. I had forgotten to take my jacket from home(after all, who wears a jacket in summer, right!!), but, in a bursts of bravado, boasted that I was used to much colder weather routinely. I spent half the evening shivering silently in my flimsy t-shirt. I thoroughly enjoyed the fair, except for that I could not go bungee jumping, tattoo my arm or get my ear pierced(all thwarted by familial pressures). Sigh. Next time, I should go alone.
That was a perfect beginning to the weekend, and I hope to do more 'posty' stuff the rest of the weekend. Stay tuned.
2 comments:
"Headache relieving chappals!!!" I am stillll laughing over it!!!!!!! :D :D :D Nice experience!!
@Divya: Yeah.. I think there is a homegrown team of mad scientists behind that exhibition - to come up with ridiculous stuff like this!!
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