Harvest Day Festival

As I mentioned yesterday in my post, Harvest Day was celebrated on Saturday in a medieval city called Mediaș. This is an old tradition in my country, dates back to communist times, but back then it was liked for different reasons. These days it's a nice event to celebrate autumn and also appreciate local producers for their effort. There was an awarding ceremony at the end and most, if not all of them got a diploma and some prizes, which was a nice gesture made by the organizers.

Harvest Day Festival.jpg

The reason I like these events is the decorations and the way those booth, and tables are decorated. The atmosphere is also special during the event.

What was done differently from the usual events here was the participation of schools and kindergartens. I've never see them participating, but I find it as an excellent idea. This table for example was brought to the festival by a kindergarten called Wonderful Spring.

Parents from the Little Prince kindergarten did their best to decorate those tables the best way they could, with all kinds of goodies.

But to start the festival the right way, there were some booths with traditional food and drinks, to bring the right mood on. The one on the photo was called The Warehouse Of Drinks. You can see the wine press, which served for decoration this year. My dad has one and I used to press the wine with it from time to time.

Cheers! I enjoyed the taste, it was good. In case you are wondering, this was semi sweet white wine.

There were these autumn decorations, which can never be missing from any fair. These two little ladies were posing in their traditional Romanian folk costumes in front of the chariot.

All kinds of autumn goodies, from onions to cabbages and pumpkins.

I took this photo on the go as I did not know how these vendors will react. I remembered Hive account@gabrielatravels told me people in this county are not nice and don't like people taking photos, so I took this shot and was prepared to run, as always 😂. Yeah, who said taking photos is an easy job or not dangerous. Seems I'm lucky as no one said anything, on the contrary, but more about that later.

I'm used to honey sellers, but the abundant offer this lady ha surprised me. I'm not sure how familiar you are with honey making, but imagine each type of honey needs to be collected from a different field of flower. This means you need to be in multiple places during the summer, for the bees to so their job. Those honey bears are still calling my name. Childhood memories :)

Here they had all kinds of canned goods, pickles, onions, garlic and so on.

One good thing to mention is the execution. Most of them took the time to make their table look traditional, attractive and even inviting. This lady dressed in traditional folk costume had nice, embroidered table cloths as well.

Fruits anyone?

And finally, this was what I was waiting for. This table was brought by a kindergarten called Children's Joy. I was hoping to see more compositions like this, but seems like organizers had only a few decorations, the rest was the sellers' job.

Garlic anyone? I really loved these garlic braids with dry flowers and red paprika.

Instead of garlic, we choose ice cream :D. I had salty caramel and the other was with fruits. Mine was good, I could have one every day.

There were different craft products as well, souvenirs.

I used to see people from South America posting about restaurants having special places set up for taking photos. At harvest day, these were the special places. Very rustic, isn't it? The good thing about this was, after sitting on those straw bales, the straw got transferred to your pants and you looked like sleeping in a haystack :)

Blue guys were also there, there's no event without them actually. I took a candid photo, hoping they don't turn back to see me as there's no running away from them :) But no worries, nothing happens if you take a photo of them. I did it two yours ago at another festival, they saw me and greeted me, asking me jokingly if I was targeting them.

Last, but not least, there was table full of soaps, candles and all kinds of goodies. I wanted to be polite and took a photo from far. The man saw me and invited me to take photos from close as well. He said he doesn't mind at all, on the contrary. This was a very nice gesture and I hope there will be more people like him. All in all, no one had any problems with me taking photos.

Lately I've developed an addiction to soap, but buying blindly is a risky business as you never know if it's good for your skin or not. Truth to be told, it's the same with shower gels as well, but maybe those are not as expensive as craft soaps. I have a crafter I'm usually buying awesome soaps from, so I guess I'd better stick to those, rather than experimenting. These looked good, but I was brave :D

I liked those candle in coffee cups and soup mugs. The dark one, which was chocolate, was calling my name, but I was brave 😂.

Coffee aroma anyone? I loved the soup mug more, but there's a high chance I can buy a mug like that without the candle inside. Not that I would not like the coffee candle.

So this is it for the day, I hope you were able to find something that you liked.

The event was covered by the local papers as well, but the article is in Romanian. This is for Hive account@gabrielatravels 😜.

This was not the first edition of the festival and I hope it wasn't the last one either. Also hoping to see some improvement net year. Let's see if I can attend.

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