Cal State Fair August 17, 2007

I spent pretty much the whole day in Sacramento with my brother at the 2007 California State Fair. Originally we were planning on buying the special ride wristbands like we did last year for unlimited rides, but we decided to save the $50 and not go on any rides. Instead, we walked around and explored the fair.

I’m happy and surprised that my brother agreed to not go on rides this year. Last year was fun, but I’ve gotten too big and old for some of the rides that were exciting when I was younger.

For example, I’m no longer a fan of being flipped upside-down or shaken vigorously.

The exhibits were interesting, but the main Toytopia feature this year wasn’t as good as the superheros or star wars exhibits we visited in previous years.

The major fun thing we did today was attend all three “Travelling Game Show” shows. You’re not supposed to know the time and location since it’s a wandering attraction, but we managed to find all three.

The “host” of the show stood on his tiny little mobile platform, and hosted the show quite loudly in trafficked areas of the fair. He asked questions of the audience and loudly claimed to be giving away prizes like a Porsche, trip to the Bahamas, and hundred dollar bills.

However, by the end of the day we realized that he was giving out prizes you could probably find at your local dollar store.

Whenever an audience member shouted out the correct answer, he would throw them a plastic bead necklace. If you collected three necklaces, you could trade them in for a “wonderful prize”. The prizes turned out to be things like cheap airplane gliders you can buy at dollar tree, a cell phone bubble necklace, a portable fm radio, a deck of cards, and other small things.

In the first two shows we attended, I shouted out answers and won a necklace in each. However, I couldn’t answer any in the third game, so we brought home two necklaces instead of a “wonderful prize”.

Another activity we did during the day, was walk around in the carnival games area and spectate all the games in which people were ignorantly throwing away money. I explained to my brother all the little ways they tricked you into believing the prizes to be easily winnable. It was pretty interesting watching person after person throw away $3 dollars on a single basketball shot at a non-regulation hoop.

After a while, we started calling the carnival games “cons”, so my brother would say things like “lets go back to the cons”.

We left after the third game show we attended, at about 5:20. Our car was parked in the Arden Fair Mall parking lot, and we dropped our stuff off at it before going to the mall and eating dinner at Fresh Choice. Fresh Choice has a lot fewer items than I remembered them having…

When we were filled with food, we went into the mall. I gave my brother $10 dollars to spend in the mall because he agreed for us not to buy the $25 dollar wristbands. He ended up buying a skateboarding video game.

I went to Champs to look at the shoes (I’ve been wearing sandals everywhere for the past eternity, even during the past winter at UCD), and found that they had a 2 for $89 sale. If you purchased the pairs of shoes separately, they cost 60-70 dollars, so I thought it was a pretty good deal (my mom thought so too). I spent about the same amount for my last pair of shoes, and wore them for more than 3 years.

I ended up buying a black pair of K-Swiss and a white pair of Adidas. Preparing everything I’ll need in Berkeley has been pretty challenging. I never knew I needed so much stuff on a day to dad basis before I started gathering the items.