Chula Vista Lemon Festival 2013

This past Sunday we did a quick visit to the Chula Vista Lemon Festival.

(sign that was on the window of Sweet Sisters Bakery)

We hadn't gone in a few years and were curious about the food offerings...

Signs were everywhere it seemed promoting the event. This was on the corner of 1st and H...

Several blocks of historic downtown Chula Vista's Third Avenue were closed off for the festival. It was nice being able to walk in the street and not worry about being mowed down by aggressive drivers, ha.

This was the southern end of Third. We heard some really good music as we arrived and wanted to check it out. It was the guitar solo of "Since I've Been Loving You" by Led Zeppelin. At first I thought it was a CD being played, but realized that it was just one person playing the guitar and no other instruments.  More on this in a tiny bit.

As we approached the performance area, we saw these two booths...both featuring lemonade.

A lemon slushy was our first purchase of the day and a good call too since it was starting to warm up.

Now back to the music.

There was a young teen on stage by himself immersed in his masterful playing of rock classics like Led Zeppelin and Santana; he played "Europa (Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile)" and garnered much applause from the audience, including myself.

It turns out that this young guitarist was a 13-year old named Stefanos Alexiou. He has his own YouYube channel, AlexiouTV (Check it out! The kid rocks!) !  Apparently, he taught himself to play guitar at age 9 so he could perform at his elementary school's talent show. There is a video of him, aged 10, playing Van Halen's epic guitar solo, "Eruption"! While not a note for note rendition, it was still pretty fkg good for someone who was self-taught. Even more impressive is that his guitar videos caught the attention of blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa AND guitar god Steve Vai himself and was featured on their web tv channels! Lastly, this kid is the lead guitarist in a Led Zeppelin tribute band playing with dudes more than twice or even three times his age! Bravo for him! I hope he makes it big!

I really dug this kid's performance! In fact, here's a video of him that same day performing Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe".  He totally wowed the crowd, especially when he played the guitar BEHIND his head a la Hendrix:

Holy shit, get this kid a music contract NOW!

Now on to the food booths. This was funny because The Cookie Lady booth was manned by a guy! What sucked about this booth was that none of their cookies, bars, etc were priced. They were all in plastic containers and you had to ask (not that I did, but I saw many others do so). How inconvenient and lame to not even have posted prices.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable about this sticking point but anyhow, we didn't get anything from here. I was not impressed by their offerings.

Below, another lemonade stand, this time with strawberries.

This is a booth I hadn't seen before, Quality Coast Gourmet Street Kitchen:

I was hoping to see pupusas there and was happy to see it represented. Let's go get some!

Lots of flavors, but no revuelta (which has EVERYTHING)...These were $3 each.

They were also selling sliced up fruits in cups...

The woman serving the pupusas was happy to know that I knew the name for the "cabbage" which is "curtido". I got to speak a tiny bit of Spanish with her. Muy amable!

The one on the top was pork and cheese; the one below was loroco (a type of edible flower native to El Salvador) with cheese. TC liked the pork better than the loroco, which seemed to have a bit of a kick to it. Maybe they added chiles or something to the cheese because loroco by itself isn't spicy.

This was a good snack to start off our mid-day while we listened to The Basics, a local band from Imperial Beach.

On the corner of F and 3rd was this booth,British Invasion.

We shared the Shepherd's Pie ($7) with a side of HP sauce...

This reminded me of the Corn Pie we had at a Chilean place in Kensington Market during our Toronto trip in 2010 but with mashed potatoes instead of corn.

It was okay, but I don't think I'd get this again because I didn't like how soft everything was. It was kind of like baby food.

I liked the name of this booth. N-U-T-Z!

Of course, a funnel cake booth was represented...

The Vogue Theatre is still shuttered. This is where me and my sibilings saw Star Wars back in 1977! More recently (if you call the early 90's recent), Bert and I saw "Surf Ninjas" there!

Although the bacon hot dogs smelled tempting, we were, surprisingly enough, done with food.

We thought this was a cool umbrella which was printed with comic strips.

Now this was kind of disappointing, the Mr. Frostee cart. TC and I wanted the soft serve but didn't realize until after we ordered that they only had vanilla. We wanted one chocolate and one strawberry soft serve cone. Instead, they handed us with a scoop of the said flavors in ice cream form. WTH. That sucked because I didn't want ice cream but since it was already scooped, I didn't want to ask them to put it back. That was $4 wasted ($2 a scoop).

They should have had a sign that said, "Vanilla soft serve only". Frack.

Dammit.

We liked the lemons decorating these potted palms...

Another restaurant (I forget which one) was offering specials featuring Lemons. Beside lemonade and this place, there was a lemon pie eating contest for kids and a lemonade drinking contest. Later on, we saw the Lemon mascot. Lots of folks were also wearing yellow, including yours truly.

This seemed too healthy to be at the festival.

Sweet Sisters had a new macarons sign. When I went in to check on their flavors, they were low on almost every flavor, but they did have their PB & J that I really like. I exercised great restraint and walked out empty handed (this time).

TC and I sat in the shade by the benches near Sweet Sisters while Bert got some kettle corn for us to snack on before heading home.

It was fun people watching and seeing the streets filled up with happy folks enjoying the day and festivities. Along with food and craft booths, there were pony rides and  a rock climbing wall, as well as contests from several radio stations. There were no carnival rides like a few years ago. Maybe this was a result of budget cuts or something. The festival was a bit on the smaller side, but I liked it that way.

As we were walking back to our coveted parking spot in the shaded lot, we saw this dude, the Lemon Festival mascot adjusting his leaf topped cap.

It was a nice way to spend a couple of hours, drinking in the sights and enjoying a few good snacks and hearing some great music too!

Previous posts on the Chula Vista Lemon Festival:
2006 - "Squeeze My Lemons" - Now this is an ANCIENT post!
2010 - Part 1 and Part 2