To the East, to the West

Hi kids. Just wanted to give you a heads up on a couple things going on this weekend - albeit outside of SoCo.

First, just to our east, we have the 27th annual Takoma Park Street Festival on Sunday (10/5). Although they do have a website for the event; it provides very little information on what is going on. They do say there will be crafts, music, children's activities and food vendors. But they do not list any of the food vendors - so I'm at a loss. For those who know Takoma Park, we know there is not a preponderance of restaurants. My guess is that perhaps you'll see Mark's Kitchen, Savory, and maybe that Middle Eastern place. No disrespect intended, but nothing terribly exciting.

Secondly, to our west, we have the 19th annual Tate of Bethesda happening tomorrow (10/4) from 11AM-4PM. Admission is free, however if you want to actually taste some food, then you'll have to fork over some money. Hey, nothing is free in Bethesda baby. They will be selling "taste tickets." These gems will go for $5 (for 4 tickets). The tastes will be between one and four tickets.

There appear to be a lot of restaurants participating this year. If you head over, you can try exotic tastes from Austin Grill, Ben and Jerry's, Chipotle, DrinkMore Water and Trader Joe's. Oooh, sounds yummy. OK, I'm being a little catty. I just have a grudge against Bethesda. My partner and I have been avoiding it like the plague over the last few years. To me, whenever we were there, it was simply a sea of white faces. I mean the only diversity we saw were from the service staff employed at the restaurants. For full disclosure, I am white - although given my Italian descent I have been described as a little swarthy - but at the end of the day I cannot really consider myself anything other than white.

But hey, we have plenty of diversity in SoCo and to me, that is what makes it such a great place to live. You can see it as you stroll down the Avenue on a Friday night - whether you're choosing La Bamba, Olazzo, Taste of Jerusalem or perhaps the Lotus Cafe. And the diversity not only includes race, but class too. We are more than a bunch of upper income families. I'm not saying we don't have our fair share of professionals, but we also have plenty of working class folks too.

All right, maybe soon we can pull off a taste of SS. A couple years back SS Singular blogged about why we haven't done this. As Sligo says, "even friggin' Wheaton has one." And again, this was from Oct 2006. Over the last two years we have plenty of new spots that could help support our own taste. OK, I'll start to work on this for '09!