Home Sweet Beer Festival

I’ll preface this by saying that my day-to-day life is a Central American cultural experience, so don’t judge when I say that on Saturday I fully appreciated, and even reveled in going home.

I went back to Colorado on Saturday.

Ok not really. I went to a beer festival, but it felt like home. The smell and taste of craft beers, the ambient sound of English floating in conversations all around me, the general air of relaxed excitement about being in the presence of something other than good ole Imperial or Pilsen. I kept feeling like I had just seen my friends a second ago and they’d be back any minute.

*****

I didn’t get a ticket. I didn’t know I could go until they had already sold out. You could still enter for free so the ticket thing wouldn’t normally be so bad except that with the ticket you got a t-shirt, and an awesome little beer-sampling mug, and some other random shit. I LOVE free t-shirts that are actually cool…*sigh. It’s ok.

My roommates, Veronica and Isa had tickets so I can’t really complain too much. With the ticket you were able to taste every beer they had there so I just mooched and we all left pleasantly buzzed. We tried everything from IPAs to stouts so rich and dark it was like sipping a cup of coffee (I think one might have actually had coffee in it) to one or two so sweet and light they could have been juice.

The beer was really only half the fun though. It’s the people who make these things. It’s the grown men in lederhosen (or rather, grown man. Singular.  One dude just rockin it). It’s the fact that one brewery brought goats to the event. I mean who doesn’t want to pet a baby goat while they taste beer? It’s the 60-something year-old gringos who have clearly retired here and are just livin’ the dream and making beer. It’s the guy who gave me his pretzel necklace when he saw me pointing at it. I was only trying to ask Isa how you say ‘pretzel necklace’ in Spanish. It’s the photo bomb below. It’s the sweet sweet sound of English drifting on the breeze.

I have grown oddly accustomed to only understanding about 25% of what I hear on the street or just in passing. For an eavesdropping addict this can get frustrating at times. So imagine how surreal and even heavenly it was to be surrounded by words I didn’t have to think about to understand. Imagine just being able to know what everyone was saying. Ok, not really a leap of the imagination for most of you…but I was like a kid in a candy store. I pretty much walked around for the whole afternoon with a huge perma-smirk plastered on my face.

*****

So I guess in closing, live where you live and soak up the culture, but there is also something to be said for being able to think you’ve gone home every once in a while.