Today in Pictures

Picture it: Seattle's Fremont Solstice Parade... meets Oxford. That's today in a nutshell, only with no naked cyclists (which, I guess, is a significant difference). Get ready for a lot of photos!

The Cowley Road Festival is awash in 1) Adorable kids in homemade costumes and 2) amazing foods of the world. In fact, Heather, Alison and I remarked it was probably the single best collection of food all in one place we'd ever encountered (holiday dinners at home, notwithstanding).

Here are Alison and Heather, all rainjacketed and ready for the minute-by-minute weather changes. Actually, the drizzle today probably kept some folks away, which allowed us to move around freely (another difference between the Cowley Road Festival and at least this summer's Fremont Fair).

This group of kids sang traditional Polish songs.

Still a bit of a mystery, a group of bear-suited folks protest something under an inflatable "Climate change kills!" airplane protesting something entirely different.

One of a hundred stands with Thai, Jamaican, Lebanese, Greek, Italian, Indian, etc., etc. food for sale. (And that doesn't begin to touch the organic produce, homemade pesto, baked bread, and more.) I ordered from this stand; red curry over beef with pumpkin (pictured) and cashew chicken, both over rice, both fresh and incredible.

Big smile (as ever) out of me with a plate of Thai in my hand...

Thanks to Ed, I now have a camera with ridiculous zoom. Speaking of ridiculous zoom, this child is about to do exactly that, down a giant inflatable slide.

Me and one of the locals.

Thanks to Ed, I also have a camera that allows surreptitious photos of other people, this time a child with his chicken satay...

... and this time, a happy sequin-headed kid.

I'll post about twenty pictures of this group on Flickr, but we caught a kids-n-teens hip-hop dance ensemble, all in matching sweatshirts and (at this point) matching shades. AWESOME.

Really, words to live by, right? But also extremely helpful at complicated intersections when you're not sure from which direction the traffic comes (again, words to live by). This is from our walk home today. Love to all!