Taste of Colorado

It's a three-day festival over the Labor Day weekend that blocks traffic at crucial intersections on Broadway crossing Colfax (15th) and 14th Street. That is, for traffic east and west and north and south at the heart of Denver's two major intersections, for busses and taxis, Uber and Lyft, and general cars and trucks it's a major pain in the B-U-Double cross streets.

For me it's just a few blocks away.

A short walk of those few blocks through a crowd presently is an ordeal.

The idea is precious in its conceptualization but complete fail in practice. The original idea was to have the state help top restaurants introduce themselves to Denver citizens by showing what they have on their menus. 

What happens instead is massive fair-food; roasted corn on the cob in several booths, roasted turkey legs in several places, Pepsi, water, beer in several places, tacos, cotton candy, bowls of sprinkles for children, berry-kabobs, freshly fried potato chips, tiny trays of crap all over the place. There is literally nothing appealing to eat. Everything grossly ridiculously overpriced. Careless zoned out crowd. 

People take their dates. Typically, a woman is being dragged around by a young man. The young man is somewhat situationally aware and the young woman is in a la-la-la trance; a reversion to childhood, while the children are having a blast. The children are more like adults on adventure and the women are like children being led by men. For the most part, but obviously not always. Typically, when paired and holding hands, it is the man who sees me, a man walking with two canes, and not the woman. In other cases it is women herding their children. 

In other cases it is children roaming free, and I must say, those people are the most interesting of all. There are quite a lot of awesome young children. Kids with very real style. Styled hair, stylish tattoos, styled clothing, stylish toys such as scooters, wagons and hoverboards. 

One boy with his parent had a tuft of blond hair on the top, shaved on the sides to show a snake tattoo on the side of neck from his chest to the side of his head. Another boy with styled short hair, large trainer type shoes/boots, tight leggings torn just so, flying around in circles on a hoverboard. 

Girls in flowing floor-length dresses and outrageously large chunky gold jewelry. 

Lots of black people dressed to the nines. Animal print shirts, novelty socks, everyone in brand new trainers. Everyone dressed up very nicely. Latinos and Latinas dressed up for a day out. 

The worst dressed are white people, carelessly, who apparently shop at Target. The men dress as boys who don't know about clothes and whose wives pick out rags for them at Walmart, and the women dress like they just flat don't care. 

Here's the weird thing. It's a racket. No money is exchanged inside, discounting the ATM machines to provide cash to buy tickets. No buyback of unused tickets. So you must guess how much you think you might spend and bite the extra tickets you buy. It's quite impossible to estimate exactly. 

I took my backpack and expected to stop at several booths and bring back at least $30 worth of food items. I estimated on the short side.

I did not predict all the available food; hotdogs, nachos, tacos, chips, fruit-kabobs, will be in paper trays and not in packages that close. I did not pack Tupperware or disposable containers. I saw exactly one place that sold food in containers that close. So I bought one. $15.00 for 3 bbq beef ribs. 

To be fair, they are very good ribs. And the vendors are all friendly and gorgeous. 

But the rice that came with it and the macaroni salad is pure crap. 

There is no place to sit. You must eat your fair-food standing up and walking. You must hold your drink as you are walking. Most people do this fairly well. Somewhat. They have a tendency to stop walking and just stand there in the middle of the street. 

I cannot cope with it.

Food booths dominate Broadway. Other booths are along the edges of Civic Center Park. The usual things that set up the standard tent roofs without sides. I saw names of Breckenridge and other resorts, vacation packages being sold. I saw people carrying packages of the type crafts that people vend at these fairs. I saw fair rides in the distance. 

See, the original idea was Colorado restaurants to show what they offer, but only very few of those are present, and those are the fast-food types, everything else is standard fair booths. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over. It's lost all of its original  imagination and it's dominated by the standard fair-like commercialism, places that are good at this sort of thing. There is no imagination whatsoever. There is absolutely nothing that is new. Nothing fresh. 

I resolved not to bother again. 

It's great these things happen so near where I live, so easy to avail, but it's lousy they devolve to standardization. For real food then, slip out of the Taste of Colorado and drop into any of the nearby restaurants for real food that's not going to kill you.

I'm so sick of those corn on the cob things. Yes, they're great roasted. Yes, they're interesting dusted with chile powder. But they're dipped into a non-butter oil. Everyone is walking around munching a corn on the cob as if that's the best thing they can get.

I stopped two Asian men walking together. "That turkey leg looks really good." It's a Renaissance Fair type of thing. It does look good. I've never eaten one of those things. They have a beautiful bbq bark. The man said, "Yeah, but it cost $15.00. It was $30.00 for these two.

I still had over half my tickets and all I wanted was to get out of there safely without having a heart attack. I'm serious here. I'm treading dangerously. I really do need to get home, but I'm not experiencing any of the pain that sent me to the doctor and put me in hospital so I'm glad about that. Just really tired and my muscles are failing. I need sleep immediately. So I scanned the line of people incoming, approaching the tent where their packages are checked and their bodies are scanned, and I looked in the line for a woman with the cutest kids. A short woman was with a gorgeous young girl. I approached her and handed her my unused tickets. "Here's $15.00+ worth of tickets." A perfect stranger. This is all wrong. She accepted them graciously without fully knowing what the tickets are all about. She'll figure it out. 

The cookies were free.

Also free were packages of vegetarian butter.

Also free were small boxes of energy bars. Young men who lift were carrying those around.

So it's a strange combination of free stuff and overly priced crap. 

This is where you'll see the most fat people in Colorado in one place at the same time.

Colorado is consistently rated #1 for the least percentage of overweight people. But that doesn't mean everyone is thin. Hardly. It means all the other states are even worse. Having said that, there are a lot of gorgeous people. It's that, once inside I must lean against something to take a photo and those opportunities in the crowd are rare. I must find something sturdy along the side of the crowd by the temporary fencing. Ultimately it's not worth the trouble because all of the food booths are pure crap.