When you
hear the word pumpkin, what comes to your mind?
I am
reminded of a story from my childhood in which an old lady sits in the carved
pumpkin and saves her life from the wild animals in the jungle. She says one
line ‘chal re bhoplya tunuk tunuk’ (speed up pumpkin speed up). And then
pumpkin finds a regular place in our kitchen as it is a great benefactor of
health. Pumpkin raita and pumpkin puris were the only two recipes which I knew
related to pumpkin, but when I visited the ‘Kürbis Ausstellung’ in Ludwigsburg
yesterday, I was amazed to see the different shapes and sizes and colors of
pumpkin and also the recipes made out of this not very likeable vegetable in
India, at least.
In Europe and the U.S, the pumpkin is very revered and there are
different festivals related to pumpkin. Halloween is the famous festival here.
I quote
Wikipedia
‘Halloween
or Hallowe'en is a yearly celebration observed in a number of countries on 31
October, the eve of the Western Christian
feast of All Hallows' Day.
Typical
festive Halloween activities include trick-or-treating
(or the related "guising"), attending costume
parties,
decorating, carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns,
lighting bonfires,
apple bobbing,
visiting haunted house attractions, playing pranks, telling scary
stories, and watching horror films. In many
parts of the world, the Christian religious observances of All Hallows' Eve,
including attending church services and lighting candles
on the graves
of the dead, remain popular, although in other locations, these solemn customs
are less pronounced in favour of a more secularized celebration. The tradition
of eating certain vegetarian foods for this vigil day developed,
including the consumption of apples, colcannon,
cider,
potato
pancakes, and soul cakes’.
Ludwigsburg
hosts this pumpkin festival every year. Tonnes of pumpkins are imported from
all over the world for this festival and it typically displays more than
400,000 pumpkins each year in various forms and figures. I have never seen so
many pumpkins at one go in my entire life. I saw only the orange ones which we
get in India, but here there were orange, green, and white, black, yellow. There
were different figures in that exhibition e.g. a frog or a dinosaur and they
were adorned with different pumpkins and they looked really cute. There were different
pumpkins for sale and there were also live pumpkin carving demos. The place was
flooded with people and small kids. There was a stall which sold food items
made out of pumpkin. There was soup, rice, pasta, biscuit, cake, jams, jellies,
beer, juices made from pumpkin.
You can
read more on this on the following link:
We had a
nice meal there and proceeded to see a next theme based park in the same campus
called as ‘Märchengarten’ (fairy tale garden). All the famous fairy tales were
put up in different display houses and there were boat rides and train rides
too. A small canal was made in which the boat plied and brought us to the other
end in 5 minutes. The kids were very happy and the adults joined them too for
the ride. Next we sat in a mini train which ran on steam and took us around the
park. Tanay enjoyed it thoroughly and he was not ready to get down from the
train. I had to coax him and then took him to his favorite place where there was
sand and his favorite thing to play, the slide. He must have gone up and down a
50 times and still wanted more. I was amazed to see his energy level and his
joy. He was enjoying and so were we.
At about 3 pm, we headed back and were
happy to be an audience to a world famous and world’s largest pumpkin festival.
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