Kanabec County Fair

 Mora, MN

Fair Food!

The Kanabec County Fair

Today we drove about an hour north to pick up some new counties, new highways, and visit a county fair.  It was quite a bit smaller than the Rice County Fair but it was still good.  

The fairgrounds entrance features a giant Dala Horse.

When we parked I assumed this was a shuttle that brought people to the fair but it was part of their transportation display.  You could go inside.

They asked us to fill out a thank you letter to Minnesota State Congress for funding so we could get a free bag but we said we were from out of state so they gave us a free bag anyway.  The bag features counties we haven't been to.

The photo area featured more animals in hats than I would have expected.

This Godzilla won a Blue Award!

Abraham looks worried he won't get any Valentine's Day Cards.

Apparently Butterflies start out looking a lot like Pennies.

This alpaca grew up in the mean streets of Mora.  You gotta keep on your toes (good thing alpaca have toes) and use a bit of hay like a toothpick to look tough.  This one's hair also looks pretty tough.

Not sure what happened here...

Grubbing on local pork.

There is a competition for drinking beer and then picking flowers.

This toupee won an award.

There is an award for drinking wine too apparently.

Pinball Tournament and A New Brewery

Later than evening I headed over to Keg and Case Market to play in a pinball tournament.  The market has some fun stalls in it, a big brewery, and the bottom floor has a ton of pinball machines.  The tournament was advertised as starting at 7 and ending at 9 so I figured I wouldn't be home too late.  Turns out it went until 10:45 and if I had done well I would probably still be there.  I was tired and played on a bunch of machines I didn't know and got kinda destroyed.  It was a good learning experience for me.  I came in 25th out of 31 which isn't what I consider good.  I won 2 rounds but took 4th and 3rd in the rest.  You get points each round for where you place.  7 for 1st, 5 for 2nd, 3 for 3rd, and 1 for 4th.  After winning my first round I got destroyed in my 2nd round and I think that put me on edge for the rest of the tournament.  There were some games I should have played better on.  Next time!

The tournament is $6 and you get a token for a free $7 beer.  I like that math!

This is me scoping out the competition.

The competition was intense!

This gal slapped and shimmied to first place in one of my rounds.  She ended up 7th.

It's fun watching everyone's style of play.  Some are pretty still but many are incredibly animated and really fun to watch.  I am noting all of the tournaments near our future stays and hope to play in more.  It's an inexpensive fun evening if you don't buy a ton of beers, which I don't.

That's it for today.  If you missed Visiting the Hmong Marketplace check it out.  The Twin Cities area is the largest urban Hmong population in the world.

Visiting the Hmongtown Marketplace

 St. Paul, MN

I got to feed a Giant Rabbit today!

Hmongtown Marketplace

Today we drove to St. Paul to visit the Hmongtown Marketplace.  It's an open air / not open air marketplace serving the 47,000+ Hmong people in the Twin Cities area as well as people like us.  If you want to learn more about how The Twin Cities became the largest urban Hmong population in the world there is good info here on Wikipedia.

We visited on a very hot Thursday so it wasn't as hopping as it normally would have been but it was open enough for us to get a good idea of some of the things that the vendors sell there.  We started in the food court where we looked at everything and then circled back to buy the most interesting items for lunch and dinner and probably lunch again.

Boo!

This was a cool art piece hanging in the food court area.

The food court had all kinds of food but most of it was meat and that meat was mostly pork and chicken.

We started by getting a drink because it was still very hot inside the marketplace.  Donna asked what I was going to get and I said the Cherry Blossom Café.  She pointed out that Cherry Blossom Café was the name of the stand and not a drink on the menu so I got Vietnamese Coffee.

Hmong Baked Eggs (they remove the egg from the shell, mix it with spices and then put it back in before baking it in the shell) with Hot Sauce and Whole Chickens with necks and heads (each one only had one neck and one head).  We only learned these weren't hard boiled eggs until writing this.  If we had known they were so complex we would have bought them.  We might go back.

For lunch we had Sticky Rice with Sausage and some sort of delicious pork parts in marinade.  There were all kinds of different bits of the pig in that bowl and it was all delicious.  I think this stand originally started out specializing in offal because they had a lot of it on the menu.

I also had to get some egg rolls.  I am a sucker for good egg rolls and these were them.

We also got beef intestine which was really good.  It seemed small for beef but that is what the sign said so we will go with beef for the purposes of this blog.

I love signs so I took this photo.  If I were to write a sign in Hmong Daw (White Hmong) or Mong Njua (Green Hmong), their two main languages, it wouldn't even be close to accurate so there is that.  That being said, we didn't buy anything from this stall because they weren't there.  They were either closed or close but either way they weren't there.

After a fantastic lunch we checked out the rest of the market.  It's made up of multiple buildings along with a couple of outdoor  under tarps.

There were a lot of stands selling traditional clothing

Or parts of traditional clothing.  It was all very colorfull.

There were also stalls selling other things.  I guess the closest association I have to this is going to swap meets in Southern California and seeing all of the Latin items mixed in with stalls like this.

Donna talked to the person at this stand and asked about the corn.  She said, Asians don't like sweet things so they buy Sticky Corn instead.  We bought some and it was less sweet than sweet corn and did have sort of a stickier more dense structure.  It was very good and not wildly different than sweet corn.

They also had some very fancy hats.  

The temperature in The Twin Cities area got close to 100 degrees today.  It isn't always this hot but it's also not unusual to get this hot a few days in the summer.

Heading Back to Psycho Suzi's

This afternoon we braved the heat and the transit system to go back to Psycho Suzi's .  When we went about 2 weeks ago, here, they were sold out of t-shirts so we put a revisit on the calendar and returned today.  It's 2 busses away so we tried to choose the best way to get there with as little waiting and walking in the sun as we could but we still have to walk a little over half a mile each direction and we had some bus issues and had to wait too long for our connections.  I am sure if we were local we would have been able to reduce the connection times with some quick thinking but we don't understand the bus system here well enough to do that yet.

We sat in the same seats as last time.

I decided to get a local beer instead of a cocktail.  It was good and refreshing.

My 2nd drink was fruity and sweet.  It was also good and refreshing.

Donna found a waterfall on the 2nd floor so I went up and took a photo.  The building is giant and largely closed except for Christmas time where they decorate for Christmas and have a giant Christmas Party and pack people in.

We didn't have any broken dreams to mend but our visit was still nice.

That was it for today.  If you missed State Capitol Building #18 St. Paul Minnesota, check it out.  We went to the state capitol.