Lilac Festival @ Calgary, May 2012

Lilac Festival happens every year in Calgary since 1989, on the last Sunday of May. This is a street festival that takes place along the 13 blocks of 4^th street SW. Every year, rain or shine, hundreds of people come out in unison to celebrate the flower that is often considered a harbinger of spring, with the time of their bloom telling if spring will come early or late.

This year it seemed that the whole population of Calgary came out to this one street. Of course there were terrible problems to park close to the festival, so residents of nearby houses took advantage of an excellent opportunity to increase their tax exempt income and organized more parking spaces around their homes.
Festival is a great way to accidentally meet a lot of familiar faces that you probably would not see otherwise for years, and so we did. Perhaps this is one of the beautiful and awkward moments of the festival.

So what is really going on there? Fun transfer – in the form of street performances, good music, latin dance, trillions of lotteries and lots of stuff to buy! There was a huge selection of jewelry, dresses, hats, rings, bells and whistles … basically all that rubbish that you do not know where to put after this kind of spectacle.

Lilacs in Calgary just started to blossom, with their inviting charming smell they welcome us into the spring!  Happy Spring!

- Kat Leto

All photography was provided to YumsterLife by Dmitry Nekhoroshkov.