Oddities at the Surry Hills Festival

When I got back from Coogee the park near my hostel was filled with stalls and information stands and lots of people. It was a one-day festival supporting the neighbourhood centre of Surry Hills, though I’m not really sure what that is. There were stalls with clothing and jewelry and your stand fair crafts, but then also some fun stuff, like New Zealand snack foods, good herbal energy potions, henna, and palm readings. The food stalls were so torturous – lots of Indian food, and limeade drinks, and mini-waffles, and ice cream. I broke down and bought a Turkish gholzene (or something like that I’d never heard of) which was like a veggie-stuffed quesadilla except with this dough stuff instead of a tortilla that was flipped over a grill.

And then there were the weird things. A stand sold wax versions of your hand – you dipped it in wax to get a shell and then they filled it with more wax and dipped it in colours (most of the example hands were giving you the bird – for clarification see the Flight of the Concords episode). 

One stand sold mustache sunglasses, which I modeled with amusement.

There was a giant tree sculpture thing with moveable eyes and someone hidden talking for it and I had no idea why.

There was also a giant inflateable Twister game, and lots of people playing it (though I don’t know why they were blue).

Random people were dressed in animal suits or like mimes or zombies, which made me wonder if all the Halloween stuff happened on the weekend. Earlier in the afternoon there was more stuff going on, but I didn’t stay for too long because I was carrying stuff and just wanted to get back to the hostel.

There were a few cool sculpture areas, including this display about energy where you could ride a bike to turn on the lights. They had a whole tent and a few other displays about environmental issues and not using disposable bottles, and even a section on ocean clean-up.

There also were some stages (one was inside this tent and was all hippie and chai-tea based) with bands blaring Jamaican music, funk from Melbourne, and jazz at various points throughout the evening. Though I left a little after 7, the music filtered through the hostel across the street for a while, as a sort of unexpected, though not entirely unpleasant, soundtrack.