River City Writer

Two of my favourite Edmonton festivals are coming up soon. The first is this weekend. In much of Canada, the August long weekend is simply a civic holiday. Here is Edmonton, the Monday is Heritage Day, and the entire long weekend is the Heritage Festival.

Edmonton Heritage Festival

If you’re unfamiliar with the Heritage Festival (or, as most people call it, Heritage Days), it’s the festival the celebrates the myriad cultures that make up Edmonton. If you’ve been in Edmonton for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve noticed that it’s a pretty multi-cultural/multi-ethnic city.

This is, apparently, atypical of Alberta (and even of Canada, to a large extent), which always strikes me as odd. Having grown up here, and lived here all of my life, I find it hard to comprehend a place that is essentially mono-cultural.

To me the Heritage Festival is awesome because, as I said, it celebrates the diversity that makes Edmonton awesome. It’s also the best festival for food all summer. The Taste of Edmonton is pretty awesome, but Heritage Days beats it with little effort.

There are 63 pavilions (representing 75 cultures), and just about every one of them has food. Where else can you eat bannock, falafel, curry, jerk chicken, green onion cakes, and langos (Hungarian elephant ears) all in one place?

Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival

The other festival that is coming up soon, that I’m really looking forward to, is the quintessential Edmonton festival: The Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival. The Fringe is the festival of alternative theatre. Because the plays that get presented at the festival are chosen via a lottery system, you never know what you’re going to get from one year to the next. It’s a mixed-bag of awesome, decent, mediocre, and downright terrible.

In addition to the theatre, the street itself is a festival of food, people, sights and smells (not of all which are pleasant).

The Fringe is also the only festival where I’m willing to tolerate watered down beer-tent draught. This is probably because the actors hang out in the same beer tent as the regular festival goers, and drunken actors can be quite entertaining–especially when they’re friends of yours.

But, enough of my rambling. I’ll go into more details about the individual festivals in upcoming entries. For now, what I really want is to ask my readers what your favourite Edmonton festivals are.

Has your favourite festival already occurred? Is it yet to come? Do you love the Fringe, or a more obscure festival that you think more people should know about? Share your favourite festivals in the comments below, and I will try to cover them in the future (assuming that they’re not already done for the year).