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Hi everybody! Well yesterday was kind of crazy. Was in Seattle from 8 AM until about 9 PM! There was a Bat Mitzvah in the morning. It's basically a coming of a age celebration for a Jewish woman. The boy's version is called a Bar Mitzvah. It's when they lead the congregation in prayers, read from the Torah, and give a sort of talk about what they've learned and what it means to them. This one was for our congregation's Rabbi's daughter. So, there was a lot of pressure on her. But, I think she did pretty well. She had a very large family show up, mainly because of her biological mom, her dad, and her step mom. All of which get a long better than I thought they would. Afterwards, there was a big luncheon. There were small bagels, lox with capers and tomatoes, Dorito chips, tuna salad, egg salad, vegan Quinoa salad, cheese, a regular salad, crackers, pita and hummus, and other somewhat snacky foods. At the end of the luncheon there was a really good carrot cake and regular vanilla cake with lots of icing and chocolate icing in between the layers.

After that we went to Folklife. I missed the Taiko drums again. Don't know if I'll ever see them. We got there in time to watch the Hungarian dancing. Then had to basically run to the Middle Eastern and Celtic blend band called Crescent and Shamrock. There wasn't enough chairs, so I couldn't see very well but it sounded cool. Then, there was a bagpiper named Ian Lawther, who explained and showed us what a lot of the different kinds of bagpipes sounded like. That was incredibly interesting. Then, we ran again back to the same building that the Hungarians were in. This next one was Ukrainian music. Kind of cool. Then, we went to watch the Morris (Welsh) dancing. After this, we saw the tail end of the Bobs show. They description said they're like Monty Python and Hendrix combined. I didn't really like them. After them was the Irish Fiddler legend Kevin Burke. My dad's a huge fan of his, and we have a lot of his music. So that was kind of cool too. We took a break after this and searched for something to eat for dinner. We decided on Gryos. Which are Greek wraps, they have lamb strips, tomatoes, Tzatsiki sauce (cucumber, yogurt, and dill dressing), wrapped in a pita. Very good. We also shared some fries that I had a bunch of herbs on them. Then, we went to see the Belly dancing. The groups we saw we called Roqs Serpentine (tribal belly dancing), Infusion Tribal and Gypsy Fire Bellydance (Mostly Gypsy belly dancing), Skin Deep Dance (more tribal dancing), and Gypsy Caravan Dance Company (Gypsy Belly dancing). After all this we were thoroughly exhausted and got on a ferry and made it home by about 10.