The San Mateo County Fair

Welcome, agricultural reader, as we walk you through our visit to the San Mateo County Fair. We were excited to attend such a thing, both as a novelty in these COVIDy times, and also to compare with our similar experiences back in the UK. Our local agricultural show, the Surrey Show, is a large and spectacular affair, which we've regularly attended for a few years now.

Now, San Mateo is the next county up from us, and it's nothing like the size of Surrey. It's pretty much a county of two halves - the eastern half, on this side of the mountains, is all about tech, and the western half, facing the ocean, is more rural. Even so, there's not a huge agricultural pedigree here.

The first thing that caught our attention when entering the show was the queue! Having arrived on the train, we wound through the car park, becoming increasingly aghast at the length of the queue we'd need to join. As we finally found the back of the queue, we exchanged guesses at how long we'd have to wait before admission. We both guessed round about 30 minutes, which wasn't far wrong. Of course, in this country it's de rigeur for such events to have airport-style metal detectors on the way in, for obvious reasons, and that was somewhat regulating the speed at which we could enter the fair.

But enter we did, and before long we were wandering through this arch of happiness:

There was a big funfair (although here they call that a 'carnival' - hmmm), and a few exhibits of local farm animals, including a rather splendid auction, where for a mere $360 or so you could pick yourself up a pedigree turkey. Based on what we saw, they don't like being picked up much, though, so I'd give it a miss if I was you.

What do you do with sleeping pigs?

We limited our interactions with the turkeys to, er, eating barbecued turkey legs. Now a more descriptive term for this would have been "overcooked gristle on a stick" but as I've often said in these pages, when in Rome. The dining options here were not of the cordon bleu variety - far from it. Your options are basically: corn dogs, hot dogs (optionally on sticks), or something off the barbecue (quite possibly placed on the barbecue before the pandemic started). But we tried, dear reader, we tried:

An old colleague of mine, a frequent visitor and traveller in the US, used to say that this country is all about quantity rather than quality, and whilst that's a sweeping and somewhat unfair generalization, it certainly seemed to apply here.

Saturday was Pacific Islander day at the fair, so we were treated to some traditional Pacific Island dancing on the main stage. This was all pretty sweet and innocent and fun, although notably the naivety that we sometimes see here in the US kicked in again: you had relatively young kids in relatively skimpy outfits dancing on the stage, in a way that would raise a set of safeguarding concerns and really not be allowed in the UK. That's not to say either approach is wrong or bad, but just that it raised eyebrows with me, or more accurately, had me looking away at some points as it didn't feel quite right. Or as Helen put it, "They might need some bigger coconuts".

Now of course, there's nothing I love more at these events than the oft-maligned comperes. What you'll typically get in the UK is one of two things: either a super-serious pillar of the establishment who probably got chucked out of UKIP for being a bit too right-wing, or a 1970s-style wedding DJ that still thinks "Walking on Sunshine" is the way to get the crowd going. Here, I'd say we got the US equivalent of the latter: a shouty DJ guy playing medleys of 70s and 80s dance music. Now much as I enjoy that kind of thing, and much as my definition of loud is different to most people's, we were about 15 rows back here and the volume was enough to make me get my sound meter out:

You don't have know too much about the inverse square law to realise the people at the very front were getting pounded with this. Good for them.

The more sedate offerings at the fair included the kind of displays and competitions that would be very at home in the Surrey show: poetry, creative writing, flower arrangements - and quilting! Here, the quality vs quantity thing was reversed, as I think the standard on show was pretty high. Well done San Mateo!

But the ultimate attraction of the whole event was in fact the pig racing. Yes, racing pigs! Cute little Gloucestershire Old Spot piglets racing around a small enclosed course. Unfortunately I can't bring you action shots, so you'll have to imagine the precise details, but this was a lot of fun and very well built up by those running the show:

The irony of travelling half way round the world to see some pigs that came from Gloucestershire wasn't lost on us, but hey ho.

Overall, the San Mateo County Fair isn't that dissimilar in form to the Surrey Show, but understandably it's a lot smaller and has a distinctly American flavour in places. If you can avoid getting deafened by the PA, and somehow manage to evade the salmonella from the food stalls, you're in for a good day out!