Italian Street Painting Festival (San Rafael)

In mid-afternoon on Sunday, June 11th 2006, I headed out to my forth festival of the weekend, the Italian Street Painting Festival in San Rafael. The street painting was stunning! I arrived around four pm, and spent nearly two hours looking at the art and taking pictures. I took many photographs (please view them!) and I have little to add to the photographs and the accompanying commentary.

After examining the street art and listening briefly to a decent enough latin rock band, I decided to grab something to eat. But before I got a chance, another band came on the stage, The House Jacks, and they were good! A capella done by five beatboxers, so it didn't sound like traditional a capella at all. While I didn't enjoy their standard repertoire much, they spent much of their show doing requests from the audience. They managed to remember enough of every song requested to be able to do an entertaining thirty second rendition. Not only were they pretty darn good at such impromptu performances, but it was clear they had fun doing so and that fun was contagious.

While listening, I grabbed dinner. They had three food booths, all generally Italian-themed. I grabbed an Italian sausage. Sliced lengthwise in half, it was spicy and surprisingly good and worked well with onions and peppers in a chunk of large soft artisan bread. The other dinner choices included penne pasta, a salad, and a few types of pizza.

They also had a wine/beer/italian soda/drink counter, at which I ordered a bellini. A bellini is a mixed drink of champagne, (peach) schnapps, peach "nectar" (i.e., juice), and a served with a slice of peach. Pretty refreshing and well-balanced.

At the end of the festival I left San Rafael, happy because of the coolness of the festival but sad because I now remembered how neat and quaint and wonderful for wandering San Rafael was. (Well, sad because I didn't have time to wander around downtown.)