Fayetteville First Thursdays

Every first Thursday of the month, downtown Fayetteville hosts a little event called "First Thursdays." It's primarily revolved around art, with artists setting up tables and booths to display (and sell!) their work, but there is also music, face painting, and other random crafts for kids. For some reason there is a complimentary wine bar, and a brewery selling beer for fairly cheap. It's nothing incredibly exciting, but it's still nice to wander around downtown for 45 minutes or so, sipping a beer, looking at art (a LOT of which is pig themed) and people watching. Doug's main comment from First Thursdays this week was "People watching is more fun when you don't know anyone in town."

This month, First Thursdays was expanded a bit, as the town joined with the University to put on "The Fest of All." It was intended to be a cultural festival, though that was not apparent from the art, only from the random music and dance numbers performed on one side of the square. We caught a belly dancing number, which was pretty cool.

Not, however, as cool as this:

The guy driving the mechanical purple dragon was tinkering with it when we first saw it, and it was awesome then, but not nearly as cool as when the giant golden tail was flicking around and smoke was coming out of it's mouth. Where is this guy's laboratory? What other kinds of things has he created? I immediately thought of the eccentric retired schoolmaster from Young Sherlock Holmes and his quest to create a flying machine. I mean, the similarities are obvious:

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, go rent the movie, it's worth watching.