Saturday 27 August 2011

Bananana

Littletree’s circus troupe performed at the Tweed Valley Banana Festival last week. She had a great time, getting to see the Banana Festival Parade, and the crowning of the Banana Princesses and Queen.

The Banana Festival is kind of funny. They have a parade with floats, and a  great big banana drives down the main street, and people throw bananas around at each other.

Only this year, there’s a banana shortage, and while we are able to get local bananas from farm stalls in the area for around $4-$6/kg (still expensive for this time of year, when they’re usually under a dollar), most folk in Australia are going banana-less and unable to get bananas for under $13/kg. So while we’re lucky in that respect, bananas weren’t really abundant enough to throw around willy-nilly.

I used to live in a town a few hours from here called Grafton where they celebrate the Jacaranda Festival every year. It’s much the same festival as the Banana Festival, only substitute for Jacarandas. There’s a big parade through the town, they crown the Jacaranda Princesses and Jacaranda Queen, and everyone gets drunk and throws jacaranda flowers at each other. Roughly halfway between the Tweed and Grafton is a town called Casino, where they hold a yearly Beef Festival. They have a parade and crown the Beef Princess and Beef Queen. I’ve not been to Casino’s festival, but I imagine getting drunk and throwing steaks around isn’t my cup of tea.

Anyway, Littletree’s performance was awesome and she had a great time

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5 comments:

  1. The circus performance looks great :)
    I went to the Jacaranda Festival once but if I was going to go some where to throw stuff at each other I'd love to go to that Tomatoe Festival they have in Spain.

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  2. LOL...here we'd have a banana SLUG festival. I can see it now...those big yellow slugs with brown spots flying through the air now. Yipes! Anyway, yipes! again for the price of bananas!!

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  3. Here in Macclesfield they have a strawberry festival....and we used to run a big hippy market here that Postcards called a 'mini womad' every sunday. When it came to the Strawberry festival, (nobody chucked strawberries round though), we had a huge one we organised, where there was a military vehicles display, next to the Greens stall, next to the trash and treasure, next to the strawberry and cream tent, next to the strawberry jelly wrestling (we had a hoot with that one, and no-one in town has ever forgot it!), which was next to the monster chai tent, which was next to our artisan and organic stalls......and it was the most peaceful, harmonious, and co-operative event the town ever had to this day!! We all had a ball:)

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  4. nice! seems they have cool festivals everywhere.
    and, today I found a farm stall up the road with bananas for $2/kg! yay.

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  5. Sounds like it was a fun event. Sadly we haven't eaten bananas over here for about 3 months now as we can't afford the $14+ a kilo. I hope we get some over here soon.

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Thanks for your lovely words, witty banter and entertaining discussion :)