May 28: Columbus Asian Festival

Over Memorial Day weekend Columbus' Franklin Park Conservatory played host to the Asian Festival. I was quite excited to check out this festival as I was hoping to chow down on some traditional Asian food. In the end it was slightly disappointing.

First of all there were some positive aspects of the festival. Mainly they had a large performance stage presenting traditional dances and music etc. Before I get any further I suppose I should specify that the day we went was incredibly hot. Furthermore hundreds of people crowded into the little festival, making it seem even more hot. So I suppose this may account for most of negative impressions of the festival. For example these performances may have been interesting but the heat deterred us from watching for long.

As expected the festival included both a food court area as well as various stalls selling 'Asian stuff.' The biggest disappointment was that most of the food stalls were just your typical Americanized Asian food, the same stuff you can buy at Panda Express. We ate at a stand with Filipino food. The food was good but lacked the robust flavor of typical Asian foods. It was most likely watered down for American tastes.

The lines for all the food stalls were ridiculously long. What's more, after waiting in line for 20 - 30 minutes, when we placed our order at a different stand we found they were out of what we wanted. All in all, because of the extreme heat and ridiculous amount of people (especially teenagers) we did not stay long.