Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival

In a break from my recent intense work schedule I managed to visit the Renaissance Festival that has been organized in the Pittsburgh area. Organizing this outing was a gauntlet in itself, since it seems everybody wanted to go but nobody could agree on a date. In the end, only two people besides me and Ana ended up going (from a crowd of more than 10). In any event, I thought it would be interesting to see how an american version of this kind of event would look like, since I have attended a pretty elaborate one in my last days back in England.

From Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival

My feeling was that the american version was interesting and fun, but the feeling of artificiality was very hard to miss. Although some of the events in the Pittsburgh renaissance festival were genuinely fun like the fire eater (video below), and the wenches were really hilarious (image above), the actual renaissance/medieval activity was quite obviously staged. That was in stark contrast to the Joust I saw in London last year. For starters we had Fabio as the "King's Champion", followed by people jumping out of horses when struck by a lance that did not even splinter.