Renaissance fun

My shins were bugging me, so I didn't go for a run or walk today. Though that's not strictly true, since today my sister, DD, and I went to a Renaissance Festival. We walked around there for about 3 hours. I was going to bring my pedometer so I could measure how far I walked, but the battery was dead. We had a good time looking at all the shops with stuff for sale and watching the joust.

It was also quite interesting to watch the other people there. It's been about 8 years since the last time I've been to one of these. There's just something about Renaissance Festivals that brings out the weirdos or the weirdo-within. The outfits people wear! Some are quite nice: the elaborate clothing of the upper class and such. But others, oh my word. Why does everyone think that women dressed as sluts back then? Apparently the more skin on display, the better. Which means of course, that there's some women with some pretty nasty sunburns this evening.

Then there's the schizophrenic dressers, like the chick wearing fur leggings, a skirt made of strips of fabric, an animal tail pinned at the waist in back, and a black leather corset thing. Who/what was she trying to be?

And apparently all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies have released a lot of people's inner pirate, because there were a lot of pirates there, male and female. Their outfits weren't too bad, everyone was trying to channel Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann. There was also some fairies, complete with wings and goofy way of walking (it's fine for an animated character to gambol around, but it's really odd to see someone try to do it in reality) and a few fairly authentic-looking Scottish outfits. I just love a guy in a kilt!

There was also a pipe and drum band that performed. They were quite good and reminded me of my long-held desire to learn to play the bagpipes. At one point I even bought a practice chanter so I could learn the fingerings. I never progressed very far though; there's a lot of memorization involved when it comes to learning and playing the music (how often have you seen a bagpiper with a music stand in front of them?) and I've never been real good at memorization. However, I think I'm going to add learning to play the bagpipes to my list of goals. Not immediately, but it is something I'd like to do, and it would be good for my brain to memorize things. If I can get the systemic yeast infection cleared up a bit more, I might actually have the brain power and mental clarity to succeed at learning the bagpipes.