Sagra Della Birra Artigianale

In Castellalto, a small mountain top village in the hills above Teramo, they hold each year the Sagra della Birra Artigianale, e.g. Festival of the Specialty Beer.  They even have a web page: http://www.festivalbirreartigianali.it/   It runs a whole week.   They have about 200 beers on tap!

This is the first year we went.  We were there on the 4th of August.  We didn't know what to expect.  Like most such festivals, they have the usual festival foods with the usual method:  you stand in line or in multiple lines, order your items separately, and then wait until your number is called to go get your food.  We did this, as usual, and as usual it's not very satisfying:  you and a dozen friends arrive at the festival, you find a couple tables together, and then practically everyone disappears in a rush to get in line and wait.  The few left behind basically are doing nothing except holding the table space.

What we really didn't realize is that you go to this festival for the beer, not the food. We should have eaten first, or just picked up a sandwich along one of the stands offering them, without trying to load up on the other festival food.   Once you've done the eating, you can settle down to the beer drinking.  Most beers were 2 euro for a 200mL glass.  A few high end beers were more expensive, with the most expensive being some special Danish beers that reached 17 and 18% alcohol.

There were some 14 stands serving beer.  The ideal thing to do would have been to go from stand to stand, each person picks a beer, then you stand around and drink them as you walk along to the next stand.  In the end that's what we ended up doing.

There was also various bits of entertainment.  The night we were there the Mo' Better Band was blasting out tunes.

We had a really good time and we look forward to making this sagra a regular stop each summer.

PS.  Giovanni, non c'è un benzinaio a Castellalto, ti devi fare il pieno di benzina quando parti da casa!

What a month at the beach does to you

So what does a month at the beach, taking the sun every day, really do to you?
You get some sun.

To more dramatically illustrate this, I've pulled out some pictures from myself from early, middle, and late this summer. These are cut out from larger pictures, trimmed just to show my face.

I've mounted them into a collage that shows you how my face looked at the end of July, early August, and late August.  The pictures were taken under different lighting conditions, so it isn't easy at first to look at them and obviously see the changes, but if you look carefully you'll see how my face starts out a little red (on July 30 I had already been getting sun for a few days -- sorry I couldn't find a good photo from earlier), then by August 7 it's starting to lose the redness and get darker, and finally at the end of August all of the red is gone and it's just a little darker than maybe you're used to seeing me.