Monday, September 29, 2008

'Noog

We went to Chatt-town yesterday and met my parents to celebrate my mom's b-day. It was big-fun. We took a boat ride on the river which the kids loved, and saw there was some kind of festival which we learned was the Krystal World Hamburger Eating Contest. There were thousands of people there, a concert, free Krystals (no thanks), amateur krystal eating contests and then the professional eaters arrived by boat like some kind of super-stars. The whole thing was broadcast live on some sports channel and it was both engaging and horrifying all at the same time, so of course we had to watch. We got off the boat ride just in time to see the finals and we had no idea this was such a big deal. There were 12 finalists, the guy who won it last year and the Japanese guy who wins all the hot dog eating contests were the ones to watch, but almost all of the finalists had won some kind of food eating contest. One guy was the french cut green bean eating champion of the world. How strange.
Luckily we were far enough away that we couldn't really see them eating or I might have been sick. Apparently they wet the hamburger to get it nice and soggy and stuffable. It was surprisingly exciting and the top 3 were neck-in-neck for a while. The winner was this guy from California who is also the deep fried asparagus champion of the world. He was the winner last year too, this year he ate 93 in 8 minutes. Ugh.
Anywho, then we walked along the pedestrian bridge and rode the carousel twice, it's a beautiful carousel with lots of unusual animals (*A* rode the fish) and it's the best deal in town. Then we had dinner, the kids played in the water play area, and I had brought a surprise coconut cake to have after, so we picnicked at the car in the dark and sang "Happy Birthday". If my mom e-mails me some pictures I'll post them later, until then you can get your curiosity over with about the eating contest by going here. It's really amazing that people do this for a living. They train and travel all over competing against each other. The winner yesterday got $20k!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey my name is kevin and i got here from a link someone left in a comment on my site. (included a news video, other blogs, etc)

anyway, i read it trying to figure out how i know you, turns out i don't think i do. glad you got to experience the Krystal Square Off, the world's GREATEST hamburger eating competition.... and, as a fellow pastor, let me assure you that your time was not wasted, your husband will for sure have an illustration out of this.

okay, well, see ya!

Heidi and Alvie said...

I'm still cracking up that the deep fried asparagus guy won. Awesome.