Saturday I had the opportunity to check out both the Arcata’s Farmers’ Market as well as Arcata’s annual Oyster Festival. While oysters aren’t necessarily my thing, I do like outdoor festivals, so I thought I’d check it out. I did try both “oyster rockefeller pierogi” as well as a grilled oyster with lemon juice and butter (cooked as shown below). Oysters have officially been relegated to “eh, not bad, but don’t really care about them” status in the Megan culinary scheme.
The farmers’ market, incidentally, was pretty cool. Instead of just one or two booths with organic produce, nearly everything was organic and grown on small farms. I had some fresh cherries, which were delicious.
The festival itself was also fun. Good live music, and lots of folks crammed, but not too crammed, into the one-square-block of the Arcata plaza. People really chilling, kicking back, some folks freely dancing. The whole thing made me remember how different just the whole cultural atmosphere of the Pacific northwest can be. Take this, for instance: six hours in the middle of hundreds of people, and I don’t remember seeing anyone on a cell phone the entire time. (What think you of that, all you Chicagoans?) That, and I still find the mixture of (left-over? neo?) hippies (old guys with long hair, women in flowy skirts in lots of colors), lumberjack-type guys in flannel and boots, and kids with dreads kind of appealing.
I also kind of like the mixture of palm trees and coniferous trees that you get around here. The palms keep kind of surprising me; it’s not too hot here, and you get used to seeing all the evergreens and then suddenly bam, there’s a giant palm in sight. Also, I was pretty amused by the number of people at the festival drinking out of paper bags (see the bottom right corner of the second picture above). There was beer for sale, but folks were obviously interested in bringing their own. (Furthermore, check out this guy’s kid brother, toasting with his water bottle: Cheers to the paper bag!)
Oyster Fest was just one day, which I’m cool with because this morning DUHC held a pancake breakfast, and I have to say I probably prefer pancakes. And the vegan pancakes we made this morning were particularly good (helping to break down just a little bit more my general skepticism of vegan baked goods). The pancake breakfast is part of the Humboldt County Exchange community currency project. You can pay to attend the breakfast with either regular cash or community currency, and there’s also a space set up for folks to bring things to barter or sell for community currency. Lots of DUHC members and volunteers and friends are invited and everyone sort of hangs out together eating pancakes and fruit and drinking coffee. It was nice. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures.
So the weekend was a fun cap to my first week here in Eureka. I’m feeling fairly settled in and like I’m gaining a good sense of the town as well as what goes on at DUHC and what I might work on there. I think it’s looking like it will be an enjoyable couple of months here.
