my medieval feast

I watched a commercial for one of these medieval feast locations the different night, and through golly, I favor to go. For those of you who do not stay in a large metropolitan area, with a glut of enjoyment options, you possibly don't even be aware of what a medieval feast region IS. This is essentially a fun-filled night for which you pay an all-inclusive admission price to sit down in an auditorium, eat meat with your hands, and watch guys on horseback attempt to spear each different in a mock jousting match. Occasionally, there is the bizarre hand-to-hand skirmish and maces and balls and chains are known as for, but generally it is just skewering. Picture your self tearing apart an unmanageable slab of cheap, underdone cow meat (heaven is aware of from what section of the cow), as you watch chain mail clad horsemen attempt to impale every other with massive pool cues. If that is not enough excitement, their galloping horses fling giant gobs of mud and saliva up into your food as they race by. You have a front row seat for all the feudal carnage and savagery you can stomach. Relive the exact old days for one, very reasonable, all-inclusive admission charge. Fun per dollar, I don't understand how you can do higher than this.

Call me a testosterone-choked moron, however I love this crap. It's now not that violence turns me on, it is more that this is simply such a ludicrous concept. It makes about as much feel as staring at the Foot Surgery Channel on TV as you take a seat down to your spaghetti dinner.

I am reminded of a funny experience I had a lengthy time ago, when I spent a semester studying overseas in Dublin, Ireland. I and my classmates have been taken on a subject trip, as section of our cultural experience, and one of our stops was dinner at a vicinity referred to as Bunratty Castle. It was once a genuine, ancient stone castle, relationship back to Celtic times, which had been transformed into a rather bizarre restaurant. First, we had been served mead wine by actual wenches, and then, as soon as sufficiently lubricated, we were led into a large banquet hall for a desirable old style throw-the-bones-over-your-shoulder medieval feast. They BRAGGED about this. The feast-o-torium seated about two or three hundred, however on the night time we were there it used to be only about 1/2 full. The tables were long, seating between forty to fifty diners, and each region placing consisted of a serrated knife and a plate, however no other utensils. For the tour team of geriatric bible thumpers from Iowa, this ought to have regarded pretty a primitive feast, but to my learn about group, made up in large phase via scoundrels of questionable Irish decent, and armed with their relatively muddled interpretation of what used to be proper medieval decorum, this was a inexperienced mild to party.

After several more tankards of mead wine, we realized that the people at the subsequent table have been a rugby team journeying from England, and that they too had been getting into the spirit of things. Once our slabs of animal flesh had been served, it wasn't lengthy earlier than the mother of all food fights broke out.

It used to be immediately mayhem, the likes of which I doubt the managers of Bunratty Castle had ever expected or even imagined.

Entertainment during our feast was supposed to be a quartet of musicians playing song from the period, and they have been all dressed in these balloon pants and the funny hats with large feathers. I'm positive they felt stupid enough dressed like that, but no phrases can describe how silly they need to have felt fending off projectiles of red meat with their lutes and drums. Amidst the chaos - and let there be no mistake, this was CHAOS, there sat the Iowans, flippantly ingesting their ingredients with as a whole lot dignity as they should muster, (remember they have solely knives with which to eat), ducking from time to time to miss the strange incoming roll or slab of meat.

Needless to say, we, the School of Irish Studies and the rugby team, were summarily escorted out of Bunratty Castle earlier than we could finish our medieval desserts, however no longer earlier than leaving our indelible mark on the persistence of these traveler entice impostors. Covered with food, we were bussed back to our resort the place we spent the next four hours ingesting even greater and embellishing what was once already a slam dunk in the "memorable experience" department. By the way, I grudgingly admit that the rugby guys gained the meals fight.

Now, each time I see an ad for one of these Joust-O-Rama places, it triggers fond reminiscences of that Bacchanalian orgy in which I used to be so blessed to have participated.

As I strategy that stage in my existence to which I loathingly refer as "approaching respectability"... that factor the place I would in no way in a million years dream of behaving with such a careless lack of decorum, I seem again on my Bunratty adventure as one of the high points in my Irish experience. Sometimes, while ingesting dinner with my wife at a fantastic restaurant, I'll toss an olive at her, just for historical time's sake. In response, she will seem at me as if to say "I married a single phone organism".... or, worse yet, she'll virtually bypass my token nostalgic gesture. That hurts. In my thought there can not be adequate of these medieval feast locations to satisfy the base needs of guys all over the world. It's in our nature to be this way, and all this garbage about the rules of civilized behavior is totalitarian hogwash, foisted upon us by using prudes like Emily Post and Miss Manners.

Oh, to be medieval again! Honey, do you be aware of where I put my suitable feather? It's time to feast!