Festivals!

It's the month of festivals here in Adelaide. I've already talked about the Festival of the Arts but there are several festivals and events going on in March that keeps the city buzzing. There's WOMADelaide, or World Music Adelaide, a festival of world music that brings in different musical performers from all over the world and they perform over 3 days at the Adelaide Botanical Gardens. There's the Adelaide Cup Carnival, which is Adelaide's version of the Melbourne Cup. There's the Clipsal 500, the premier V8 car race and car festival. There's even the Adelaide International Buskers Festival!

And there's also the Fringe Festival. The fringe is a little bit hard to describe but in a nutshell, it started as an alternative to the Adelaide Festival of the Arts, wherein smaller scale performers, and to a greater extent, comics and alternative entertainment acts get a chance to show their stuff.

Today we took the kids out to enjoy some of goings on in the city. There was a free family day at the Fringe festival and we were determined to take advantage of it. The family day had lots of stuff and it was different from the usual sort of carnival stuff on offer. There was aboriginal story telling, kite making, world music and drum beating. There was supposed to be a lot more stuff advertised but I guess were just to early for them. The girl was a bit disappointed because she was expecting carnival games and stuff but we hopped over to nearest playground and they had a bit more fun there.

We then went over to "The Garden of Unearthly Delights" which is another Fringe Festival venue and we wandered around a bit. The Garden is another collection of artists and performance venues with a carnival like atmosphere. There are carnival shows, performances all throughout the Fringe Festival held here. There wasn't too much there for little kids to do so we were content to just look around and take photos.

We then walked up Rundle Street which had some of the street performers or "buskers" doing their shows for the International Buskers Festival. This time the kids got into some of the clowns and jugglers. We even had a chance to be part of art! Yup, we got our picture taken for the People's Portrait! Then we took the free Adelaide City bus and ended up in Chinatown for lunch. We then took the bus back to where we parked our car and ended our Festival sojourn!

Adelaide does know how to put on a festival and there quite a lot of interesting shows that would have been great to attend. But I guess at this stage, the kids are just too young to enjoy a lot of them. However, the organizers should recognize the market they have in families. When we went out to the Family Day at the Fringe, it was virtually pram city! There should be more of these family friendly events in the future because I'm pretty sure they would be guaranteed hits.

P.S. Photos to follow... :)