Goombay 2019

Fantasy Fest 2019  has officially got underway with the opening of the first event of the week, which is Goombay.

Goombay is a street festival on Petronia Street from Duval to Fort and it is supposed to be a celebration of Bahama Village, the African American community in Key West. Bahama Village has seen a lot of gentrification just like the rest of the city but it remains a cohesive community ina town devoted to transient tourism.

My target was a food stall not devoted to precisely Afro-Caribbean roots, but I was recommended to try the smoked brisket cooked in the Baltimore style:

I took some home for dinner with my wife and all it needed was the recommended horseradish accompaniment. Smoke and horseradish: simplicity wins!

Goombay is afamily festival unlike the rest of Fantasy Fest. It is really a  separate event without nudity adult themes or costumes but it takes place the weekend before fantasy fest so that makes them easy to combine for advertising and promotion.

Fantasy Fest is under new management and I have to say there is a general hope that  perhaps the trend toward less nudity and more fun costumes in public will continue to be upheld this year. Goombay isn't associated with any of those issues but  with the appearance of the street fair the arrival of Fantasy Fest is obvious. 

Today there will be the Zombie Bike Ride along South Roosevelt Boulevard ending downtown with a street party of thousands of bicycle riders. Then the private parties begin and culminate in the Grand Parade next Saturday night. The restaurants open their doors, the hotels are full one hopes and the original intent to provide  an infusion of cash in a  town out of season will be fulfilled even though the season gets longer and longer. 

I have to say I enjoy Fantasy Fest so before I am roundly berated I had better explain why. This is one week Key West is on citywide vacation. That I am working every day doesn't change that. This is the city's carnival, a week in the calendar when the rest of the world carries on as usual and we have a citywide time out. Let me hasten to add I don't like costumes and I don't like the naked people being tasteless which sounds contradictory. 

I enjoy the festive atmosphere, I like smart clever costumes even if they are more risque than one might imagine consonant with this puritanical society we live in and I also enjoy the reminder however slight that Key West was and sometimes can be non conformist. 

Alternatively you can join the ranks of tut tutting people on the sidelines who welcome cruise ships and twelve month tourism and see no contradiction in abhorring this mild attempt at adult Halloween. Yes, perhaps fantasy Fest has matured enough to enjoy the costumes like adults with good taste. I wonder...

Goombay 2017

The street party on Petronia Street off Duval lasts a couple of days and I enjoy going down for a visit.

This year Fantasy Fest is under new management after the last management team retired so before the Catastrophe there had been quite a bit of speculation as to how the new fantasy fest might play out. Some residents hoped for a little less nudity and a little more fantasy...me among them, but now with the effects of Hurricane Irma Fantasy Fest becomes a bit less urgent. Making floats when you have to rebuild your home...its no contest really. Then there's Goombay.

This year Goombay has been officially aligned with Fantasy Fest as the opening event of the week long party:

I like Goombay as it is the first street fair of the winter season and I get my fill of the street food that reappears as the winter season winds along. Technically its supposed to celebrate the common heritage of Bahama Village, the African American community in Key West and their roots in the Bahamas and the Caribbean. I have had goat curry at Goombay offered by Blue heaven restaurant but mostly the food looks Colombian to me with the abundance of sweet cheese filled corn cakes called arepas:

My attendance this year got completely gummed up as my plans for a visit on Friday, my night off were killed by a major wreck on Highway One which closed the road for hours. I had come in to Key West for my exercise class and riding home I got snarled in traffic. So I got off the Vespa and pushed the 240 pound wheelbarrow on the bike path for more than a mile to get around the overturned tanker. That little walk after an hour of hard gym exercise got me all sweaty all over again:

Then my wife, coming home from Marathon, a 45 minute commute, ended up spending five and a half hours getting home...Not only was Goombay out but we didn't even have dinner together. Boo hiss. So I swung by Goombay before work last night, before the rain too:

It didn't seem terribly crowded to me but no doubt more people will come as they discover the trash in Key West has been cleared and the city mostly looks pretty normal. 

And here endeth the family friendly portion of Fantasy Fest, music food and good cheer. Now we move on to the odd parties and people wandering around Duval Street in various stages of undress. Sigh.

Goombay 2014

Not to put too fine a point on it this is a weekend of disappointment for me. I will be out of town managing to miss the Zombie Bike Ride Sunday afternoon; what is rapidly becoming an unmanageable yet very fun  part  of  Fantasy Fest Week. Plus I don't have time to lounge around at Goombay.  Grr...I like Goombay. a mild low key festivity and I should have preferred to spend more time there, but my over heated work schedule meant I could literally only drop in, walk three blocks on Petronia, pick up some food and walk back to my Vespa. However those they wish to punish the Gods sometimes reward with an easy parking spot so I got a spot very close to the festivities:

Goombay is supposed to be a Bahamian style celebration put on in Key West's mostly black neighborhood of Bahama Village so the name fits.  A goombay is I am told a form of Bahamian drum or music or some such thing. In this context its a street party to benefit children's music programs. The thing about Key West is that any kind of bacchanalia for adults or jamboree for children is always held to support some worthy cause. Drinking for well being is an odd concept outside the Southernmost City, but here its all in a day's work.

The Sarin Grill has urgent need of a marketing guru. Doubtless there is some charming family reason why they named their food stand after a deadly poison gas. However there were lots of choices so I moved along, only slightly holding my breath.

And just because this is a Caribbean street festival doesn't mean a food stand of any distant culture, description or ethnicity cannot buy space in the street. Come to Goombay and eat...Greek food? 

A  friend of mine refuses to visit Goombay on principle arguing that there is nothing special about this street fair and indeed some of these vendors will be back during the course of the winter. Which is true but Goombay is a neighborhood event where drinking is not required, kids are welcome and you get a chance to meet friends you may not have seen for a while. 

Wait a minute - jerk chicken?  That's proper Caribbean food. It was offered by Blue Heaven of course. Jerk is a mixture of spices originating in Jamaica, rather like a kind of curry dry  rub which can be as spicy hot as you like.  

 I got my four wings, spicy beans and rice and  found a quiet piece of sidewalk to ponder the meaning of life and the various meanings of the word "jerk." Eight dollars' worth of spicy sidewalk heaven.

There was a man standing close by with a bazooka round his neck, most intimidating, but he was just talking to a friend. It turned out it was actually a camera. I have forgotten people have cameras that can't make phone calls (or work as calendars, flashlights, speedometers, maps or pocket libraries).

 I was a bit early for the heavy crowds that come later in the day.

 They have a bandstand near Fort Street and the  crowds can pack Petronia Street.

 My other Goombay habit is to eat an "arepa" which food originates in South America and is utterly delicious. The best thing about Colombia is arepas and coffee for breakfast. Which may be an exaggeration but only slightly. In Key West arepas are festival food taken in winter.

Frankly one could take several meals at Goombay, none of them especially nutritious lets face it, but all delicious. Sausages,chicken, steak,  pork rinds, corn in various formats, conch salad if you like raw mollusc. And lets not forget plantains which are actually eaten in the Caribbean.

Plantains you say? A clump of adventurous eaters were looking askance at a plate of crispy fried wafers. Not bad one of them said crunching hard. Of course they're "not bad," oil and savory banana and salt. What's not to like?

My arepa was bubbly and delicious, sweet fried corn on the outside and gooey mild white molten cheese on the inside. I was very restrained and only had one.

Goombay unlike Fantasy Fest which fires up this next week, is a family affair.  The newspaper reported this week that Disney has not one but two cruise ships coming to Key West next week. Despite warnings that the little dears might encounter some untoward free radicals and loose ganglies on Duval Street. I see more outrage and stern letters of disapproval on the horizon.

But for now people have their clothes on, the sun is shining and the second mild cold front of the impending winter has struck with delicious cool breezes, no humidity and clear skies. Utterly perfect weather to be out eating fried corn and drinking nectar.

Someone has to clean up: thank you community services.

And then back to Duval Street which looked colorful and as festive as Goombay round the corner. It just gets more crowded and less clothed as the week progresses. Oh dear.

And with that, Fantasy Fest 2014 has kicked off with all the mixed feelings that it brings to this small town. On my way to work I passed my first painted face (body fully clothed thank you) peering out from the crowd on the Duval sidewalk. A white faced cat, a ghost, ahead of her time soon to be joined by a herd of odd and unraveled like minded partiers. Let the money flow. 

Goombay 2013

The Bahama Village street fair wrapped up at midnight after two days and evenings of filling Petronia Street from Fort to Duval. It's the traditional start to a week of Fantasy Fest festivities that culminate Saturday night with the parade through downtown. Friday night the top fundraisers for this year's event were crowned, Stephen Sunday was crowned King and Diane May was crowned Queen of Fantasy Fest 2013 and they will join the Grand Marshal swimmer Diana Nyad at the head of the parade Saturday.

Goodby is billed as an Afro-Caribbean type street fair and the food has a couple of nods toward the islands. Key West's other motto is "where the weird go pro" and someone has added a dot com and are making money off the ever more tenuous notion of weirdness in Key West.

Most of Goo bay is food related, four blocks of vendors, some local most not offering various ethnicities of fried or barbecued stewed or curried edibles.

I took an abbreviated hour during my last full daytime shift and went down to Petronia Street to grab what little I could of the festival in the hottest part of the day, in my police uniform polo short which always makes me self conscious. I'm not a cop but sometimes I get tested like one and it feels awkward to me.

I like arepas Colombian food in origin which are nothing more than thick corn tortillas grilled in oil(!) and between two of them you stick a slice of cheese and let the whole mess get hot enough to melt the cheese. This lot had white people's cheese, inoffensive mozzarella which is okay but the best arepas have proper queso fresco which is a mild white Latin cheese with a salty flavor. Well anyway, never mind the culinary tips, it was very pleasant to sit in the shade on a found rock and watch the world go by while struggling with a plastic fork and a hot sticky corn mess.

They grill meat at Goombay and sell Greek food,

...but I look for Caribbean dishes offered by Blue Heaven. It was a drag going in the middle of the day as things were barely getting going. Curried goat on pigeon pea rice wasn't going to be ready for a couple of hours so I got curried chicken in a pita which hit the spot.

I passed on the funnel cakes and went for the Columbian sweet corn instead.

Goombay makes for a pleasant stroll though I'd advise doing it later in the day around dusk but before the drinking gets heavy.

And do it with a friend or two.

City workers busy emptying trash. I looked inside e recycling bins and you don't want to know what I saw. The usual pile of indiscriminate trash. Sigh. I separated my trash from my corporate can of caramel fizzy water (and all important caffeine) and kept strolling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The band stand at Fort Street was not yet in use and the lounging area midway up Petronia Street was not yet busy. Evening is when Goombay gets busy.

It was hot and sticky yesterday even though the temperature was only 85. I could have worn a light weight shirt and shorts had I not been working so my heavy polo long pants and shoes and socks felt,like wet body armor. Detail officers in full uniform with impact vests and twenty pounds of belt on their hips looked like they had just got out of the ocean fully dressed in dark blue nylon uniforms.

I couldn't have a beer but by way of compensation I rode back to an air conditioned office and turned the portable fan on myself until I had cooled off. Fortunately I like the heat but not when at work trying to be cool and comfortable and efficient on the job. When the air conditioning breaks at the police station tere's nothing worse than sitting for twelve hours sweating while trying to focus on other people's needs.

Goombay is not that complicated really and a map seems a bit like overkill. Petronia Street is closed for a few blocks straight up and down, and that'a it.

And if you use the Baptist Lane short cut you can get back to your scooter pretty easily avoiding the crowds and the noise and the heat.

Well actually the heat is with us for a few days as we anticipate the arrival of a weak cold front later which should make temperatures for the end of Fantasy Fest about perfect even for pale skinned zombies from Up North.

Key West on Dwellable

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