Flowers, Flowers Everywhere!

I haven’t written lately because I’ve been so busy having various adventures! Here is one:

We went to a flower festival a couple of weeks ago about 1.5 hours from where we live. I heard about it from a Scottish coworker, and since I got the flower loving gene from my mom, I immediately wanted to go. Unfortunately, the week before the festival we had to rip out our living room floor (or more accurately, pay someone to rip it out) in anticipation for our shiny, new, non-squeaky floor that visitors and kin would not fall through. But that is another story, or two, so back to the flower festival. As written in a previous post, workers and repairmen are not the most reliable crowd here. In fact, their unreliability is quite reliable. We had offered to take our Scottish friend to the festival with us, but then had to cancel and reinstate those plans about 47 times during that week. The final word on Friday night was that the new floor was going in on Monday, so the flower festival was a go! At that point our living room floor was bare cement and all of the things that had been in the living room were then not in the living room and had found homes in our other two rooms or kitchen. So, the house was a bit difficult to live in, and a day out at the flower festival was looking better all the time. So off we went to pick up our friend.

It was a pleasant journey, until we reached the part of the highway that they had decided to turn into an unimproved dirt road, which was the last 30 kilometers of our journey. There was a water-sprayer truck, which seemed to help a bit with the dust, but also created a bit of mud. When we got back into the city, the guy at the carwash was amazed – “Where did you go with this car?” It looked like we had driven to Siberia and back, driving directly through any lakes or rivers in our way. Actually, I felt pretty cool driving around like that for a few hours. Oh yes, we are cool enough to have a car THIS muddy.

Anyway, when we entered the little town holding the festival, it was instant charm. They had posted signs for a free parking lot, which turned out to be someone’s olive grove. We just chose a tree and parked under it. Then, we followed the sound of the banging of drums to the main part of the festival. Inexplicably, there was a group of about 10 middle-aged women dancing quite rambunctiously around the drummer. This spontaneous drumming and dancing lasted the whole day. It looked like a little mini-wedding wherever they popped up. We all just had to shrug our shoulders and say “Whatever”, because there was no real rhyme or reason to it.

And we come to the festival itself. There were a hundred or so stands of flower sellers laid out on two main streets in the city. They had also set up the normal market, so there was quite a large area to walk around. The flowers were, of course, beautiful, and even better, really cheap. We got 3 rose plants between the three of us for about 4 dollars each, and many plants were just one or two dollars. We had lunch in a nice little hidden garden café that our friend knew about (he goes every year), which was a nice reprieve from the drum and dance routine. We came home with 6 plants total, some of which I don’t know the names. One was a kind of daisy, one is called the “Prayer Plant”, one succulent I found online and identified as a blue echeveria (?), and two roses, as I said. We gave the orange rose to my MIL and kept the pink one. All plants seem happy so far and are playing well with the other plants.

All in all, the festival was quite cute and worth the drive.