The Texas Renaissance Festival- Ryan

The Texas Renaissance Festival is an annual event in Houston Texas that happens every October through November in which hundreds of people dress and act as people did during the time period of the renaissance. It is an interesting experience to walk around and see all of the shops that line the paths and what each has to sell and hear people speaking in old English. To get to the festival we first had to leave our school at 8:45am to arrive with enough time to do as we pleased. The bus ride was enjoyable other than the fact that the seats were somewhat cramped and as with most bus rides was filled with mindless chatter that was blocked out with my own conversation. It was around noon when we had finally arrived and much to the relief of my backside that had been killing me from sitting in a cramped bus seat. For my self personally this was my third year in a row attending the Texas Renaissance Festival and the first thing that has to be said is that upon arriving in a woodland area you feel transported into a different dimension. The simplicity in the appeal of the festival is of a nostalgic feeling as if at some point in a past life you yourself had walked down this path. Only negative thing about being outside is that the previous night it had rained and the walkways were very mudded and it was hard to keep my shoes from becoming distastefully brown. Also as I had said previously it was hard to keep from getting sweaty in the damp humid air that surrounded the entire festival.

Walking through the gates of the festival is always interesting because you can never anticipate what will be there to greet you on the other side. Usually someone walks up trying to sell you some kind of souvenir that you don’t need but you humor the salesman by acting intrigued in what the have to offer. As I walked around the Festival the first thing I realized was that some of the shops that had been opened last year had been closed down for some unknown reason and second was that I was thirsty. At the start of the day the soda shops had every kind of soda but by the end of it all there was nothing but Pepsi left. I like attending the festival the only draw back is the distances that have to be walked because the grounds are very large but having attended it previously I had some general idea of where the shops were. For most of the day I walked around and window-shopped with my girlfriend who wanted to look at all of the shops that had anything that caught her eye. Myself on the other hand only wanted to walk around and hang out with my friends and mess with random people, which was the norm. After spending time with her I left to find my friends and we went into the Maze, which had become a tradition. This aspect that made going into the maze so entertaining was that with a group of people you could mess with people and make them go the wrong way and then when they found the way out they would be angry.

One of my friends was dressed as a Ninja and all of us had made a bet on how many people would say “Hey look a ninja”. This also made the maze more entertaining because we would tell people to follow the ninja and people would and then he would disappear leaving them lost and confused. Considering that this would be my last year going to the festival I figured I would buy any souvenir that I had wanted from the previous years. This included a pentagram necklace and an ocarina. The prices on most of the food was somewhat outrages and made the money I had brought not last as long as I had previously thought. With 3000 some odd people walking around with cash in their pockets it was easy to say that the festival made a good amount of money out of the student day. We left the renaissance festival at 3:30 and shipped off for home tired and with empty wallets. The bus ride home was not as noise due to the fact that almost no one had the energy left to talk. If I had to give the trip a ratting I would say it was a 5/5 because it was my last year going.

-Ryan