Crepes, Teriyaki, and the Mountain View Obon Festival

[tuftears]

I celebrated my birthday Friday by taking myself to the local Crepevine. I have never (at least that I can recall) had savory dinner crepes, so I figured why not broaden my experience a bit? It beat going home and cooking for myself.

Sunday, I walked down to the local Buddhist temple where they were holding an Obon festival. It was four minutes away, but walking meant that I didn't have to worry about parking.



This is the 'Philly cheesesteak crepe' that I had at the Crepevine. It turns out to be a 'casual sit-down restaurant'-- you place your order at the counter, they give you a number, then you find a table and put the sign up and eventually the waitress comes along and gives you your order. Good to know for future date purposes. Somehow I had imagined that a crepes restaurant would be fancier.

The crepe was pretty okay, not awesome. I'll have to try the dessert crepes another time.



The Obon festival was actually pretty small; I was glad that I had simply walked, it would have felt like a waste of time if I had had to drive 20 minutes and then find parking in a crowded lot. As it was, it made for a good afternoon jaunt. It's a small community 'bring the family' kind of fair. I saw a lot of people bringing their kids out, or bringing their dates. A decent number of people in light summer-weight kimonos.

The above picture is the beef teriyaki skewer, chicken teriyaki and rice I got at the festival for a light lunch. Their selection of food was very basic: teriyaki, tempura (seafood and vegetable), chicken salad, strawberry shortcake, hot dogs and corn dogs, and shaved ice-- which was by far the most popular food stand.



I browsed around the cultural exhibit a bit. They had dolls of a different kind than the ones I'd seen in the San Francisco Cherry Blossom Festival, some of which are shown above.



They also had 'Suiseki rocks', which are rocks taken entirely from nature and mounted for display on a base like this one. The artists are not allowed to perform any further modifications such as carving or painting; all they can do is choose where to cut the rock for a base. This one nicely evoked a tree growing from the mountain.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

An Obon festival? There's one in Delray Beach, Florida. (http://www.japanfinds.com/obon-bon-festival-at-morikami-museum-japanese-gardens/)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Hmm. 3-hour drive. That's the problem with Florida: I'll hear stuff like, "Oh, ____ is in Florida so it must be right next to you!" and then it turns out we're talking about something down at the bottom of the peninsula, or something way up in the panhandle. ;) In any case, thanks for the web site share: I wasn't aware of this site before.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that could be a bit out of the way. ;)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

(I'll have to check with Gwendel to see if she'd like to make a trip to this museum sometime. I'd probably need to do some more planning to see what else there is to see in the area, and make it some sort of weekend trip or use a vacation day or something.)