Minnesota State Fair

We went to the Minnesota State fair in St. Paul today. The company picnic where Michael works was today and they had a pavilion and a catered dinner for everyone. The plan was to go to the fair at 2pm and walk around until dinner at 4pm, stay for a bit then explore more of the fair after the meal. That was the original plan. What happened was we arrived at the "park and ride" location, one of several outlying parking lots where a free shuttle service took people to the fairground, and parked our car at almost 2pm. We waited for the bus for the next 20 minutes. The ride then took about 40 minutes. It was agonizing. We could honestly have walked to the fairgrounds faster than the bus took us. Once we got to the fair we were so frazzled the very first thing we bought was a beer. Now we were ready to tour the grounds and take in some quality people watching. We consulted our schedule and found that we had very few minutes until the first event I wanted to catch which was a demonstration given by a renouned local baker called, "Why European Bread isn't better." When we got to the creative arts building where the event was held I balked for a moment and said, "Are you sure we can bring our beer in here?" Michael assured me it was okay and sure enough there were several other people there carrying beers around. (Culture shock for the east coast gal. Minnesota balances its beer consumption with it's number of churches. They have large amounts of both in this state) It took a while to find the baking demonstration because I kept gaping at the knitting and quilt displays. Once there we listened to the baker (Chef Lorenz) talk about his experiences in bakeries in Italy. One interesting point he made is that Italy is so regional that someone could become a master baker but have only one or two items available. Here the consumer demands breads from all regions of Italy. He also mentioned that almost all flour used by bakers in Italy is imported from the US and Canada. Once he opened up the floor for questions I was fueled by my 16 ounces of liquid courage and an empty stomach (extra woosy) and I asked him, "I understand that Europe has very strict guidelines about using genetically modified foods, do they apply any of these standards to ingredients imported from the US?" (I ask because I know that most corn grown in the states now is hybridized and lab created, and I wondered if the same could be said of wheat and if that mattered) I must have stumped him because he rambled on about quality control and lot tracking and just got completely flustered before the other baker stepped in to get him back on track. I'd have preferred it if he said he didn't know.
From there we went to the company picnic and had some nice catered food, chatted with a few of Mike's co-workers and then went off to find another beer and some greasy fried Fair food including a super corn dog, a chili dog, a fresh dairy strawberry shake and an ice cream cone.
First we went into Heritage square and found the some truely awesome stuff.





We walked past the Butterfly house.


We saw a demonstration on making homemade fudge. They poured a big gob of molten fudge on a marble table and the guy kept going around and around the table folding the fudge back in on itself until it cooled enough to take a shape, and they could add a layer of peanut butter which he folded the fudge over one last time. Decadent???


We saw a dog obedience class from a school called "Dances with Woofs". They had the dogs and owners doing steps and formations to music. The also sprayed glitter on each dog's hind end. wtf?


My favorite character of the event was a guy I spotted outside the pet building who was stroking and talking to his parrot. I snapped a pic of him and as he walked past I commented how beautiful his bird was. He said her name is Betty and she's 5 and a half years old. He let me pet her too. Awww...

We didn't visit the animals this year, we focused on crafts instead. I feel bad, the birthing barn is a fun event, but my feet were killing me and my stomach was stuffed after over 4 hours of walking around. In all, a great day.