7-21-12 Belly Dancing (Medfest) @ Hiawatha Park (W. Seattle)

Bangles & Baubles

Our annual journey to a photographer’s/videographer’s paradise begins in the Olympic Mountains of Mason County via Rte. 2 (or Rte. 1 if you’re in Shelton) of the MTA connecting to Rte. 3 in Belfair which is synchronized with the Bremerton-Seattle ferry run.

Dancing: Good for the Soul

You’ll need to catch the 6:50am bus, though, if you want to get about 7 hours of play time with the 8:30 ferry to Seattle before catching the 5:30pm return ferry and the last MTA bus to get you back where you started.

CAVEAT: The MTA Rte. 3 bus driver didn’t think it was important enough to check to make certain all passengers had disembarked from the 6:30pm ferry (even though many were still walking off the boat when she put her coach in gear AND LEFT at least one stranded!) before leaving the Bremerton ferry terminal. This necessitated an emergency Taxi cab (an additional $22 fare) to catch the errant driver halfway to Belfair. SO—be extra critical and remind the bus driver to alert dispatch you WILL be returning the same evening on the 5:30pm-6:30pm Seattle-Bremerton ferry run or you risk being left in the lurch at dockside. Also, if you had the foresight to include the MTA’s tel. # on your cell phone, call dispatch IMMEDIATELY to alert them the driver has abandoned you. The MTA office is closed, of course, @ 6:30pm, but word has it that if you wait and dial ZERO (like the bus service you’re getting), it will roll over to dispatch, which actually stays behind the scenes available to drivers until the last one returns ~8:00pm (except on Sunday when no bus service can be had in Mason County, unlike King County).

Riders should urge the MTA to require the Bremerton run bus driver actually walk the few feet to the terminal and LOOK to see if the ferry is allowing new passengers to board. If not, the MTA bus should wait at dockside until it DOES! It’s not like, being the last run, it’s going to miss ANY connections!!

Bookends

Medfest (for Mediterranean Festival) has been an ongoing popular free (to you, anyway) event for more than 25 years featuring ‘belly dancing’, music, beautiful women of all ages, stripesj & sizes (and the rare male belly dancers too) along with so much color in the plethora of costumes as to make your retinas burn.

Some of the younger women have figures to kill for while others are simply beautiful with their belly dancing hearts on display. While the still shots capture details and the splendor of their costumes, the video clips bring a kind of magic the still camera cannot: When the ladies begin to dance, THEY ARE ALL BEAUTIFUL!–I kid you not. It’s like the belly dancing godmother sprinkled fairy dust on them. A magical transformation takes place the viewer can’t help but notice.

This extravaganza goes on for the full weekend (Saturday & Sunday) beginning at 11:00 (So there’s time to make your buss connections from the downtown ferry terminal and get to the festival in time to grab a chair else you’d better be bringing your own because the venue is absolutely packed.) Every other member of the audience (or more) will have a camera in hand. The front row has the best camera angles, but you’ll need to arrive early for that.

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The event comes complete with a thicket of vendor booths selling every imaginable custom designed costume, jewelry, and otherwise impossible to find artisan creations that would win the fancy of just about any woman who has wanted to dance. There are TWO (2) stages, an outdoor one and an indoor (gymnasium) one going full tilt simultaneously. It’s a family venue with many teens and children present. This kind of celebration is easily worth $50/ticket, but it has always been free to the public. It is held in a public (Hiawatha Community Center) park located at California Ave. SW, and SW Lander St. in West Seattle. There are showers and locker rooms for the performers. The organizer’s name is ‘Babs’ and you should contact her to make arrangements for when you or your groups will perform. Bab’s receives no compensation for her commitment, but she does arrange to pay the Center a sum (from vendor’s fees) for the weekend use of it. There’s no fee for performers–all are welcome. But the competition is uniformly impressive.

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1 Response to 7-21-12 Belly Dancing (Medfest) @ Hiawatha Park (W. Seattle)

  1. admin says:

    Don’t buy products advertised by the ‘copyright’ scammers filing specious ‘copyright violation’ claims in order to get Youtube to sell them ad space on your posted video clips.

    As a courtesy to the producer and acknowledgment of the abuse of the digital Millennium Copyright Act’s take-down notice provision, do NOT buy any product advertised superimposed on this clip. Discourage the abuse.

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