Bizarre Festivals

47 Bizarre Festivals Articles

190 Bizarre Festivals Snippets

55 Bizarre Festivals Photo Galleries

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Bizarre Festivals » 47 Articles

Article Title: Festival of San Fermin

Festival Name: San Fermin

Festival Country: Spain

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Traditional, Party

The Festival of San Fermin, first made famous outside of Spain by Ernest Hemingway in his novel 'The Sun Also Rises' (also known as 'Fiesta')

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Article Title: Three and a Half Ton of Bull

Festival Name: San Fermin - Running of the Bulls

Festival Country: Spain

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Party, Sport - Bizarre

My stomach was churning, my palms sticky, my heart smashing at the inside of my ribcage. I put on a brave face. Strange to think that I'd paid to be here.

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Article Title: Spain's Tomato Battle

Festival Name: La Tomatina

Festival Country: Spain

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Party, Food

But contrary to all this evidence, La Tomatina, an annual, city-wide, tomato riot, remains an inexact science. One would think that after 63 - or is it 64? - years, the residents of Buñol, Valencia, Spain, would have their facts straight. Some say La Tomatina uses 150,000 tomatoes. Other claim the number is over 1 million.

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Article Title: La Tomatina - The World's Biggest Food Fight

Festival Name: La Tomatina

Festival Country: Spain

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Party, Traditional

As history spells it out, what began in 1944 as a simple tomato fight between a group of friends in the town's main square - the Plaza del Pueblo - has turned into arguably the worlds largest food fight. Actually, there is very little to argue about.

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Article Title: Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling

Festival Name: Cheese Rolling

Festival Country: England

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre, Traditional

I never expected to spend my May Bank Holiday weekend as a participant in one of Europe's wackiest and most dangerous events, but there I was, perched atop a huge, steep, bumpy hill in Gloucestershire as an entrant in the third race of the day, about to throw myself down after a piece of rolling cheese.

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Article Title: Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire

Festival Name: Cheese Rolling

Festival Country: England

Festival Type(s): Sport - Bizarre, Bizarre, Harvest

Wherever it's origins it's hard to argue that cheese rolling is a sport for the outrageously courageous or at least the dangerously demented. Contestants in the Cooper's Hill event (between Gloucester, Stroud and Cheltenham in the Cotswolds) on the last Monday in May, stand precipitously at the top of a 300 yard hill, that maintains a gradient of two in one for the most part whilst a Master of Ceremonies counts them down.

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Article Title: Calcio Storico

Festival Name: Calcio Storico

Festival Country: Italy

Festival Type(s): Sport - Football, Sport - Bizarre, Bizarre

Steeped in almost 500 years of tradition and described loosely as a mix between football and rugby - with a good dose of bare-knuckle boxing added to the mix - Calcio Storico is not a game for those who flinch at the site of blood.

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Article Title: The Art of Burning Man

Festival Name: Burning Man

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Art, Performing Art, Bizarre

Black Rock City, as the town centered around Burning Man is known, is now the third largest city in Nevada, although it exists for only one week a year. It is also perhaps one of the best-designed cities in the world. It works wonderfully. It's safe enough for women to walk around naked. It's chock full of fantastic and real art. Transportation is primarily via bicycle. It's got a world-class view of a unique wilderness. Consumption is low and creation is high.

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Article Title: Irish Road Bowling

Festival Name: Irish Road Bowling

Festival Country: Ireland

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre, Sport - Ball

They call it "bowling," yet it has nothing to do with glossy white pins, oiled wooden lanes, or shoes, colorfully designed for humiliation, that have been worn by a dozen other strangers that day. Welcome to the wacky world of Irish Road Bowling.

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Article Title: World Championship Rotary Tiller Race

Festival Name: World Championship Rotary Tiller Race

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre, Sport - Motor Sport

According to the PurpleHull Pea Festival in Emerson, Arkansas (population 359), the Weyerhaeuser 200 World Championship Rotary Tiller Race is the "highlight of the tiller-racing season." Considering it's the only tiller race around, the "Tiller Thriller" is indeed a highlight.

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Article Title: Mower Racing

Festival Name: Mower Racing World Championships

Festival Country: England

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre, Sport - Motor Sport

An English rally-car racer, frustrated by the rising costs of his sport, debuted the event in 1973: Lawn-mower racing offers an inexpensive, accessible event with no lingering misgivings about whether or not to bag your clippings.

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Article Title: Outhouse Racing

Festival Name: Outhouse Classic

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre, Community

With the advent of indoor plumbing, traditional outhouses suffered a tragic fate: They were mounted on skis and pushed down a hill - welcome to the wacky world of outhouse racing

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Article Title: Wife Carrying

Festival Name: Wife Carrying World Championships

Festival Country: Finland

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre, Party

At the Wife Carrying World Championships held annually in Sonkajärvi, Finland, it's the husband who does the schlepping - the wife holds on for dear life - across a course that's over two-and-a-half football fields in length and punctuated with sand, hurdles, water obstacles, and gravel pits

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Article Title: Toe Wrestling

Festival Name: World Toe Wrestling Championships

Festival Country: England

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre

Every year, competitors from as far as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Germany travel to the Bentley Brook Inn in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, England, for the world's least furtive and most aggressive game of footsie: The World Toe Wrestling Championship

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Article Title: Elephant Polo

Festival Name: Elephant Polo World Championships

Festival Country: Nepal

Festival Type(s): Sport - Bizarre, Bizarre, Animal

This sport, played exclusively in four countries - India, and the three-members of Elephant Polo Association: Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Nepal - presents all the challenges of pony polo, plus plenty of problems particular to playing perched upon pachyderms.

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Article Title: Orange Battle at Canrevale di Ivrea

Festival Name: Carnevale di Ivrea

Festival Country: Italy

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Carnival, Party

Unlike La Tomatina, the ammunition at Italy's Carnevale di Ivrea's orange battle doesn't get squished before it is hurled in the streets. It may, however, become smushed after colliding with the helmets that keep faces from leaking their own natural juices.

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Article Title: Rioja's Wine Battle

Festival Name: Battle of the Wine - Batalla del Vino

Festival Country: Spain

Festival Type(s): Wine, Bizarre, Food and Wine

In this juiced-up battle, the grapes have already been squished and fermented, so participants need only wineskins, plastic jugs, trashcans, water guns, or crop sprayers to spill, spritz, and splash the other 9,000 revelers at the Batalla del Vino or Wine Battle, in Haro, part of Spain's Rioja region.

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Article Title: Shrovetide Football

Festival Name: Shrovetide Football

Festival Country: England

Festival Type(s): Sport - Bizarre, Bizarre, Party

Imagine an NFL football game. Now, round out that ball, lose the shoulder pads, and add a few hundred or even a thousand players to each team. Okay, now move the end zones three miles apart, and dam a river at the 50-yard line. Now you're ready for some Royal Shrovetide Football

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Article Title: Naked Men Festival - Hadaka Matsuri

Festival Name: Naked Men Festival

Festival Country: Japan

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Nude, Traditional

In the Hadaka Matsuri (the Naked Men Festival) instead of sharing good fortune, for one night, every February, 10,000 tattoo-less men gather at the Buddhist temple to fight for it.

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Article Title: Extreme Coldwater Swimming Championships

Festival Name: Winter Swimming Championships

Festival Country: England

Festival Type(s): Sport - Water, Sport - Extreme, Bizarre

It's true: some do like it hot. The rest, on the other hand, drink Brass Monkeys, Blue Tits, and Chilly Willy: The only three beers served at the Winter Swimming Championships

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Article Title: World Sauna Championships

Festival Name: World Sauna Championships

Festival Country: Finland

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre

The best competitions make leisure into sport, like turning an afternoon of watching flicks into a movie marathon. In Finland, where there are 1.5 million saunas for 5 million people, organizations of World Sauna Championships did just that with the first competition in 1999.

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Article Title: Phuket Vegetarian Festival

Festival Name: Phuket Vegetarian Festival

Festival Country: Thailand

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Cultural, Religious

Deafening fireworks, raucous drums, colorful flags, floats and flowers, the pungent smell of Chinese herbs, and a procession of trance-induced young men and women, bodies and faces punctured by objects as diverse and bizarre as swords, mechanical tools or plant life...welcome to Phuket's Vegetarian Festival!

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Article Title: Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival

Festival Name: Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre, Winter

No trip to Colorado would be complete without attending the strangely-bizarre, Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival in Nederland held annually in March

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Article Title: Viana do Bolo Flour Festival

Festival Name: Flour Festival

Festival Country: Spain

Festival Type(s): Traditional, Bizarre, Community

The whole Latin world celebrates carnival during this time, and Galicia is no different. Different areas celebrate in different ways, all with their own trademark. One such trademark is the orgy of flour throwing which engulfs the town of Viana do Bolo, in Ourense, every year.

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Article Title: Songkran

Festival Name: Songkran

Festival Country: Thailand

Festival Type(s): Traditional, Religious, Bizarre

During Songkran everyone is armed. Old and young, all have buckets, bottles, hoses, urns, water guns and even the fire tender is on hand to add to the total sum of water.

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Article Title: The Holi Festival

Festival Name: Holi

Festival Country: India

Festival Type(s): Traditional, Cultural, Bizarre

Holi is all about colour, namely colour in the hair, colour on the face, colour on your clothes, colour all over the streets and colour just about anywhere else it'll stick.

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Article Title: The Festivals of Valls: Humans Castles and Calçots

Festival Name: The Festivals of Valls

Festival Country: Spain

Festival Type(s): Traditional, Cultural, Bizarre

One of the loveliest aspects of Catalonia, or certainly one of the most striking, is its capacity for local celebration. The Catalans are good at blowing their trumpets or more correctly stated the "gralle", an oboe like traditional Catalan instrument used in all the local festivities including Sardanas, Human Castles (Castellers) and the town parades of giants and puppets.

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Article Title: SPAMARAMA

Festival Name: Pandemonious Potted Pork Festival, SPAMARAMA

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Food

Officially called the Pandemonious Potted Pork Festival, SPAMARAMA^TM draws 10,000 people with a highly refined sense of humor to one of the wackiest festivals in America

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Article Title: D.B.Cooper Party

Festival Name: D.B.Cooper Party

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Fan Convention

D. B. Cooper is famous for one, single act - he hijacked a jet in 1971 and parachuted into the Washington night with $200,000 of ransom money tied to his waist

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Article Title: World Pillow Fighting Championships

Festival Name: World Pillow Fighting Championships

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre

Anyone over the age of 14 can enter as long as they leave their maturity outside the arena. Competition begins by straddling a slippery wet pole suspended over a pit of mud.

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Article Title: World Championship Kinetic Sculpture Race

Festival Name: World Championship Kinetic Sculpture Race

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre

World Championship Kinetic Sculpture Race - A kinetic sculpture is an imaginative, often wacky - but always ludicrous - contraption designed to travel along an obstacle course on land, through mud, and over deep harbor waters

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Article Title: Thaipusam - Festival of Faith

Festival Name: Thaipusam

Festival Country: Malaysia

Festival Type(s): Traditional, Bizarre, Religious

As an avid attendee of matsuri (traditional festivals) across my adopted home country of Japan, I had thought there was little to touch them in terms of color, vivacity and raw animism. Until I went to Malaysia's Thaipusam festival, that is.

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Article Title: Fertile Fun

Festival Name: Hounen Penis Fertility Festival

Festival Country: Japan

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Traditional, Street Parade

Remember the joke about the three old ladies and the flasher? Two had a stroke, but the other one couldn't quite reach.... Well, the Hounen matsuri (festival), held annually at Komaki's Tagata-jinja shrine, provides plenty of opportunities for all present to get their hands on some outsized phalli.

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Article Title: World Body Painting Festival

Festival Name: World Body Painting Festival

Festival Country: Austria

Festival Type(s): Art, Bizarre

Colors fly in a weeklong event known as the Mecca for body painting. A quaint Austrian town plays host as artists from around the world come to feast their eyes on the wonders of nature and all who are naturally painted.

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Article Title: Roach Racin'

Festival Name: World Championship Cockroach Racing

Festival Country: Australia

Festival Type(s): Sport - Bizarre, National, Bizarre

Only in Australia would they celebrate their national holiday by racing cockroaches. Yes, that's right I'm talking about those pooey brown, hairy legged, skin crawling, under the fridge indulgers and lights out kitchen partiers that infest much of the land Down Under.

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Article Title: Game of the Bridge

Festival Name: Game of the Bridge

Festival Country: Italy

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Re-enactments, Historical

Rival teams from different quarters of Pisa fought for symbolic possession of a bridge over the Arno River. In those times, the games often degenerated into brutal and bloody man to man fighting.

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Article Title: Blobfest Brings 'B' Sci-Fi Horror Film Back to Life

Festival Name: Blobfest

Festival Country: USA

Festival Type(s): Film, Bizarre

Indescribable... Indestructible! Nothing Can Stop It!' So reads the tagline of the 1950s Sci-Fi classic, The Blob. And nothing seems to be stopping a festival that brings this kitschy film back to life.

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Article Title: Hadaka Matsuri - Naked Festival

Festival Name: Hadaka Matsuri - Naked Festival

Festival Country: Japan

Festival Type(s): Nude, Adult, Bizarre

Talk about male bonding! Have you ever gotten together with your buddies, stripped down to your thongs, and paraded around the neighborhood? In groups of 10-12 people at night? In mid-winter? No? Well, since I know you're dying to do this, I'll tell you about the Naked Festival in Saidaiji, Okayama prefecture.

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Article Title: Bathtubs on the River

Festival Name: International Regatta of Bathtubs - La Regate des Baignoires

Festival Country: Belgium

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Sport - Bizarre

The hot sun of a mid-August day beats down on a motley flotilla as it makes it way down the River Meuse through the town of Dinant, Belgium. One of Europe's lesser-known festivals, La Regate des Baignoires, the International Regatta of Bathtubs, was, as the local tourist board cheerfully admits, a promotional stunt dreamed up to bring visitors to this sliver of a town wedged between steeps cliffs and the Meuse River about an hour from Brussels.

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Article Title: The 10th Annual High Times Cannabis Cup

Festival Name: Cannabis Cup

Festival Country: Netherlands

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Adult

The Cannabis Cup is a 5 day long celebration of the many wonderful things about marijuana. It's official purpose is to bring cannabis experts together so that they can 'taste' the latest varieties of marijuana and hashish, and vote for the one they like best, much as a panel of wine experts might gather to judge the year's wine offerings.

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Article Title: The Wetter the Better - Thailand's Songkran Festival

Festival Name: Songkran Water Festival

Festival Country: Thailand

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Traditional

Imagine this scene: scads of Clampett-like hillbilly families crammed into the back of pickup trucks, chugging along in bumper-to-bumper traffic and squirting water at other vehicles and pedestrians. The water warriors use squirt guns, super soakers, hoses, buckets, garbage cans and anything else they can get their hands on in order to disperse their liquid ammunition. Drive-by squirtings everywhere.

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Article Title: Kanamara Matsuri Festival - Festival of the Steel Phallus

Festival Name: Kanamara Matsuri Festival - Festival of the Steel Phallus

Festival Country: Japan

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Traditional, Adult

A large, pink phallus turns the corner and heads down the street. Sitting atop the shoulders of 10-12 men in bandanas, it bobs up and down to their rhythmic chants. Locals carve white radishes into images of the male reproductive system, preparing to auction them off at an afternoon banquet. Transvestites line the street; their red lipstick and hairy legs are no less a contrast than the grandmother who's licking on a lollypop that's in the shape of a....well, you can probably guess by now.

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Article Title: Charleville Camel, Donkey and Yabbie Race Festival

Festival Name: Charleville Camel, Donkey and Yabbie Race Festival

Festival Country: Australia

Festival Type(s): Sport - Bizarre, Bizarre, Party

Whilst travelling through Central Queensland we heard of the upcoming Charleville Camel, Donkey and Yabbie Race Festival and felt we just had to be there. We made a dash to Charleville risking life and limb, travelling at night through the kangaroo infested outback.

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Article Title: Camel Wrestling

Festival Name: Camel Wrestling Championship

Festival Country: Turkey

Festival Type(s): Sport - Bizarre, Bizarre, Sport - Combat

While the Spanish have bullfights, and the Italians cockfights, and the English go hunting with hounds, the Turks have camel wrestling.

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Article Title: Art on Cows - Luxembourg

Festival Name: Art on Cows

Festival Country: Luxembourg

Festival Type(s): Art, Bizarre

The plaque on the base of the first cow offered little in the way of an explanation - Spledide by Christine Dumbsky. She was a metallic blue beast for the most part, with deep purple hooves and featured two topless pole dancers air brushed on her left flank.

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Article Title: Battle of the Oranges

Festival Name: Battle of the Oranges - Ivrea Carnival

Festival Country: Italy

Festival Type(s): Carnival, Bizarre, Party

That fight for liberty is recreated with the Battles of the Oranges, which substitute stones. Italy exceeds its production quota of oranges as agreed within the EEC (the European Economic Community) , so the excess needs to be destroyed (just to keep up the retail price). My co-citizens cooperate in the difficult path towards a unified Europe by helping to smash some oranges.

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Article Title: Beer, Women and Huge Male Genitalia

Festival Name: Hounen Matsuri

Festival Country: Japan

Festival Type(s): Bizarre, Traditional, Adult

Not to be outdone, every March 15th, the small town of Komaki, Japan celebrates Hounen Matsuri. Matsuri means festival and Hounen, I'm fairly sure, means Big Wooden Penis. Okay, actually it means something much less interesting, but it SHOULD mean Big Wooden Penis, because there is, in fact, a Big Wooden Penis featured prominently throughout the festival.

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